Victoria and Esquimalt have been ordered by the province to hire six new police officers. They weren’t hired last year because of budget cuts.
“When resource pressures exceed available personnel, what greatly suffers first is the proactive and preventative work,” Tonia Enger, acting director of the Police Services Division, says in a letter to Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins and Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, who co-chair the police board.
“In my view, such work is not a ‘nice to have’ but is in fact a necessity,” Enger says.
The province was asked to weigh in when councillors for Esquimalt, which covers about 15 per cent of Victoria Police Department costs, voted 4-3 last year against spending $40,778 for Esquimalt’s share of the cost of hiring the additional officers. Victoria councillors voted in favour of a $528,000 increase to the police budget for the six officers.
At the time, several Esquimalt councillors said they couldn’t see why the department needed more officers when quarterly police statistics have regularly shown reductions in calls and crime rates.
When the six new jobs weren’t approved, Police Chief Del Manak responded by redeploying all three school liaison officers, one intelligence officer, one reserve constable and one community services officer to patrol duty.
In her letter, Enger says: “Strategies that seek to engage the public, build relationships, reach out to vulnerable groups and thereby prevent crime are central to Canadian policing where the measure of any police agency’s effectiveness is the deterrence of crime and disorder, not the number of criminal charges or statistics.”
The only condition Enger added was that when the six officers are deployed, there must be an allocation to meet Esquimalt’s needs “without regard to the demands driven by the downtown core and to ensure consistency with the Framework Agreement.”
She says that at the heart of the Victoria and Esquimalt’s Framework Agreement on policing is the understanding that the communities have different policing needs and expectations.
“In this case, when one sifts through the deliberations that Esquimalt was required to make in response to the request for additional resources, there was not sufficient communication as to how those resources aligned with community needs,” Enger says.
Desjardins said she was disappointed with the decision, but heartened that Enger wants some of the new resources to be dedicated to Esquimalt.
“I’m disappointed because we feel in Esquimalt that we don’t need that extra person. However, I’m very happy that it has been recognized that the Framework Agreement is imperative to follow and that it has not been upheld,” she said.
Helps said the decision is not subject to appeal.
“I think the province has made its ruling and we need to fund six officers for the police from their request from last year.”
She said Victoria’s council will need to discuss the budget implications.
Victoria councillors have already voted 5-3 to limit the police department to an increase of about $1.8 million this year on its nearly $54-million budget.
Esquimalt hasn’t voted on the police budget yet.
