Police union defends hike in rates

Obscenely high and unsustainable policing costs. OPP bills are destroying communities its officers are supposed to protect. Apparent self-interest is cloaked in the guise of public safety needs. Where is the political outrage while OPP costs continue to climb? Who is going to bring policing costs in this province under control?

Police union defends hike in rates

Postby Thomas » Fri Jan 24, 2014 5:44 am

s being touted as more efficient, more transparent and fair by OPP association brass.

Although Jim Christie, President of the Ontario Provincial Police Association admits that he has no control over the municipal billing model that is likely to take effect in early 2015, he was prepared to provide his insight into the issue.

According to Christie, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario demanded Madeleine Meilleur, Minister of Community and Correctional Services do a review of OPP billing in the province.

“I can honestly tell you that the old billing model was very hard to understand, it was very convoluted and complicated from an explanation perspective,” he said. “That is through no fault of anybody other than it was just a very complicated thing for local politicians to get their heads around.”

It was that initial request that set the minister and the OPP on the task of coming up with a new, more efficient, more transparent billing model.

“…and more importantly a fairer billing model,” he said.

Christie says rural municipalities and small townships across the province were previously charged on a fee-for-service basis, charged essentially based on the number of calls to the municipality.

“I’ll use Bancroft as a great example. All of the small communities around Bancroft were paying very little for their policing but Bancroft itself who hosts the schools and the hospitals and the urban centre of that local area was being billed at a very high rate,” he said. “It’s just because the model didn’t show the difference between a hub community and a local township.”

He says some communities were paying less than $100 per household whereas a neighbouring community could be paying $700 per household.

The new model, a combination of fixed infrastructure costs, will cost out the actual price tag for policing, says Christie, taking into account things such as the cost of buildings, tires, vehicles, guns and the bodies who do the work.

“A small portion of that will be the actual calls for service,” he said. “So the fixed costs are going to be divided across all the communities that receive OPP policing.”

Christie says that in the end the new OPP billing model will see the cost of policing in most communities rise a little.

“I’m going to say two-thirds will go up a little, one-third will go down a significant amount – these hub communities,” he said.

But he says compared to their municipal police force counterparts, the OPP costs will remain favourable.

I’m not trying to sell the OPP, these aren’t my rantings. These are StatsCanada reports on the cost of policing per household,” he said. “We do recognize as an association the financial burden that these costs create in the municipality. Our members are taxpayers too.”

Christie says that hopes for future amalgamation and regionalization will see those fixed infrastructure costs reduce.

“The fewer police services we have and the more communities of police service serviced, the cost per household should and will come down,” he said.

Essex County is an example where the OPP has regionalized. There is one detachment for Essex County, with 260 police constables.

“They have an inspector and three staff sergeants in charge. That’s their management structure, and then the shift supervisors,” he said.

He says compared with a small police services such as that in Midland, where there is a chief of police, an inspector, two staff sergeants and six sergeants for 30 constables and a communications centre, the OPP is cost-efficient.

“There’s no way we can compare the efficiencies that the local detachment in Midland could bring to that municipality if in fact we took over the policing responsibilities,” he said.

Christie says OPP costs are, 80 to 90 per cent of the time, cheaper than local police services, however he says he hears the concerns from municipalities that the cost of policing is spiraling out of control.

Christie is part of a provincial initiative called the Future Policing Advisory Committee, a group established at the request of the chiefs of police during the last provincial election.

The committee examines the core services the police provide in the province of Ontario including crime prevention, community safety, law and order, and emergency response.

“…all of the things that are delineated in the Police Services Act, which is the law of the land that dictates how policing is delivered,” he said.

Currently police officers are doing functions that Christie says might be better handled by civilian police members or privatized. However, with privatization of some core responsibilities, Christie says there is a risk of losing oversight and the public’s ability to have transparent investigations into police actions. However, some tasks, such as data entry, could be handed off to civilians trained in data entry for a fraction of the cost.

That part of the committee’s work came to fruition last year when the province agreed to hire 250 civilians.

“That’s not at the expense of police officers but what it will do it allows folks in your communities to have police officers back doing the core functions of their job,” he said. “…politicians are simply saying, policing is one of our highest budget items, is there a better way to deliver service?”

One thing Christie and the advisory committee are looking at is the 52 police services in the province, and he says through economies of scale there are efficiencies.

“We have 52 chiefs of police, we have 52 police services boards, we have 52 HR departments, IT departments, we have 52 communications centres,” he said. “When in fact, we could find further efficiencies with the regionalization and amalgamation of services.”

Christie says the future of the policing committee will never move quickly enough for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, some police services board members, the City of Toronto or some facets of the Ontario government, but he says the work is too important to do wrong.

“Any decisions made at that committee have to be fact-based and has to be well researched because the price of getting it wrong is too high,” he said. “We don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the high level of public safety we have in Ontario and that’s, from my perspective from an association, and primarily a police officer.”

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