“Costs cannot be reduced without taking unacceptable risks. Otherwise, the service will have no prospect of delivering adequate and effective policing services as required in legislation.”
That was Toronto Police Service chief Myron Demkiw, speaking last week about the difference between the $1.186 billion he asked for and the $1.174 billion he’ll likely be getting in this year’s police budget. You’d think he’d have to squint to notice the $12 million difference.
Though seemingly all other social and government services are expected to tighten their belts and do more with less, Demkiw went on the offensive, essentially arguing a difference of just more than 1 per cent is all that separates Toronto from stability and total chaos.
This is a strange argument for Demkiw to make. Imagine you make $50,000 a year (an average salary in Ontario), and you’ve been asked to reduce your income by $500 to help get your employer back into a better financial position. No one would be happy with this arrangement — understandably so — but few would argue that a 1 per cent pay cut would be the difference between getting the job done and having “no prospect of delivering adequate and effective services.”
It doesn’t inspire much confidence in the Toronto police when the chief strongly suggests that such a small difference between the desired budget and the proposed budget is all that stands between Toronto police doing what’s expected of them and, apparently, letting anarchy reign.
If the leader of any other municipal service made a similar argument, they’d be ridiculed. Our political leadership routinely expects other public services to work better with budget cuts. How many times has the phrase “trim the fat” been used to describe a budget cut whose anticipated result is a better functioning service? Nurses and teachers regularly experience far more significant cuts to the health-care and education budgets.
Though many people seem to believe crime — particularly violent crime — is on the rise, evidence tells us otherwise. Toronto’s violent-crime rate is moving in the same direction, with a 30 per cent drop in gun crimes in five years. But research suggests that none of this has anything to do with how many police are employed or how big the police budget is.
In Canada, spending on police has increased in nearly every major city. As such, policing is now far and away the single largest consumer of municipal tax dollars. But a recent paper in Canadian Public Policy that looked at 11 years of data from 20 of the country’s largest cities found “no consistent associations … between police funding and crime rates across municipalities, and overall, net increases in spending per capita are not associated with greater net decreases in crime rates.”
Time and again, police brass say they need money to hire more officers: Demkiw aims to hire more than 300. Yet “evidence suggests that rates of crime have nothing whatsoever to do with the number of police officers,” John Sewell wrote last year in the Toronto Star. “Other Canadian cities have more police officers per capita than Toronto but they also have higher rates of severe crime.”
If the goal is actually to reduce crime, money could be better spent on the marginalized — on homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and social workers. As criminology professor Martin Andresen writes in The Conversation, “If we are concerned about crime and its severity, we should support reinvesting public funds into preventative strategies such as housing, mental health care, basic income and addiction services.”
I don’t think Mayor Olivia Chow’s 1 per cent budget cut makes her any kind of radical anti-police activist, despite how some critics may portray her. That even suggesting the police might do their part to help balance Toronto’s budget through a paltry reduction can elicit such an extreme reaction from the top cop suggests strongly that police brass already consider themselves more equal than others and the budget sacrosanct. That’s already several steps too far down a path this country doesn’t want to be on.
At this point, policing doesn’t seem to be about fighting crime as much as about the self-preservation of a large, unionized workforce. In much the same way that Big Oil is doing everything it possibly can to prevent transitioning away from fossil fuels for energy, police services — facing the hard evidence that they’ve lost some public confidence and that there are far better ways to deter crime — are pulling out all the stops to ensure they are protected from progress.
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