The Board of Police Commissioners met virtually on Wednesday afternoon, Oct. 25, to get public feedback on the police budget priorities. Halifax Regional Police made the same budget asks at this meeting as they did at last Wednesday’s BOPC meet—which keen readers may remember we described with the headline ”Talk of hiring 24 new cops is a waste of time”—but with a little bit more information about what the police budget is.
Salaries are the main cost of the budget, accounting for $101.7 million in spending last year, with police operations costing the city an additional $6.5 million. It’s not all costs, though: The HRP was able to bring in $13.6 million through things like turning HRP officers into rent-a-cops for Galen Weston to make sure his profits stay high. Recouping that money means for the current financial year, 2023/24, the HRP cost the city a total of $94,622,400.
HRP’s acting top cop Don MacLean didn’t give much new information from last week’s meeting. This meeting MacLean mainly focused on one sub-group of the 24 proposed new hires—12 new patrol officers who would also be trained up as mental health first responders, “for service & hospital wait times” as the slide deck put it. He said his force needs the new officers for all the same reasons as last meeting, with none of the supporting evidence requested by the board members at the last meeting. This supporting evidence would also be very beneficial to members of the public, so they could have informed opinions on police spending. Without that supporting evidence, we instead had this meeting, which was functionally the same as the last meeting, save for a handful of public speakers providing feedback.
In this meeting a/chief MacLean told the board that he believes a civilian mental health response is needed, and it would be able to take care of the majority of mental health calls the police currently get. This in turn means that, if the BOPC is confident in its ability to stand up its new public safety strategy and get the civilian response force up and running, these proposed new hires are already redundant. However, if the board believes it will fail in standing up the civilian response force it will recommend hiring these 12 new cops.
One of the public speakers at Wednesday's meeting, Dr. Jamie Livingstone, who has a doctorate in criminology, pointed out that very inconsistency in the police hiring requests.
Commissioner Gavin Giles pointed out that hiring and training cops up for the purpose of having them waiting in hospitals is wildly inefficient, and then called the Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment Act that requires cops to do the waiting “dumb.” Which it is. The clause in question that keeps cops waiting with people who they end up bringing to hospital reads: “(2) The peace officer or other authorized individual shall remain at the place of the medical examination and shall retain custody of the person until the medical examination is completed.” Here’s to hoping we get other, less expensive, authorized individuals to hang out in hospitals.
Public speaker and Halifax resident Kate MacDonald pointed out that the people who were advocating for police spending have systemically benefited from increased police spending. When asked to clarify by commissioner Giles, MacDonald pointed out that white people in Halifax have had a statistically better time interacting with police than their non-white counterparts.
Systemic reinforcements of benefit exist in subtler ways, as well. Among the members of the public who spoke in favour of more police spending was Chandler Haliburton, a Dartmouth resident who said Dartmouth is now “horrific,” and referenced a recent stabbing. But it may also be worth pointing out that rising home prices are driving up rates of poverty in Canada, and the more poverty that exists the more crime there will be. But real estate agents get paid on commission, and that commission goes up with home prices. So real estate agents have a natural incentive to want to see home prices go up. In the spring, Haliburton was featured in a CTV story where he was trying to benefit from a hot real estate market.
If he was successful in capitalizing on the real estate market this summer, in doing so, he was inadvertently working to exacerbate the crime he complained about at Wednesday night's meeting.
The Halifax Regional Police have yet to provide a costed budget, or evidence to support their budget asks, so it remains impossible to say if their request for more officers is a good idea or not.
