The city’s top cop is looking at ways to reduce overtime within the police service and slim down their more than $35 million budget.
During the 2013 budget review, Thunder Bay Police Service Chief J.P. Levesque mentioned there were major changes coming to the force. The main change will be around how the service deploys its officers. The focus will be changed to a more community based policing model.
“We investigate 3,000 occurances of domestic violence a year, which is one of the highest rates in Canada,” Levesque told council at Tuesday night’s meeting.
“They’re very time consuming. It takes approximately sevem to eight hours to investigate a domestic violence call where there are charges laid. We’re looking at the possibility of having a specialty team focus on just that. In terms of what that will do to cut costs, if our officers aren’t spending as much time stuck at the hospital before they have to come back to do a report it should cut down on overtime.”
Becoming more efficient will reduce the budget, he said.
But finding efficiencies are one of the solutions.
Levesque said the city also has to look at finding more facilities and beds for people with substance abuse issues. Since the police have to look after the individual, it ties up staffing.
He said it also becomes a liability issue.
“If we could get out of housing the same people who have addiction issues, it would be a benefit to us,” he said. “If we had more detox beds that would be a great start. From there may be some more alcohol management programs as well.”
The police service as well as fire and EMS all came before council with an increase to their budgets. The police came in at $35.2 million, a 3.4 per cent boost from last year.
Levesque said the main reason for the increase was because of wages.
Neebing coun. Linda Rydholm mentioned that it appears that policing costs have increased across the country for a number of reasons.
Levesque said rising costs are an issue for all levels of policing from municipal all the way to the federal level.
“Investigations are becoming more complex…the advent of the Internet has changed things dramatically for police services,” he said. “We’re one of the busiest police services in Canada in Thunder Bay with 50,000 calls a year. Over 26,000 of those calls are reportable. We’re a very busy police service and I can’t see that slowly down any time soon.”
