Just the facts on police funding
Recent controversies around police behaviour toward Black and Indigenous people in the United States and Canada have led to popular protests and widespread calls to “defund the police.”
Which begs the question: how much do we currently fund the police? To find out, you need to go through the annual financial reports of municipal and provincial governments, which I did. The most reliable information we have is for operating budgets alone, so they either don’t include, or may under- report spending, on police buildings, vehicles and other equipment. But these data are the best we have at present.
What they show is that in most cities police budgets have been rising in real (i.e., inflation- adjusted) terms, reaching $ 393 per resident on average in 2018, about 35 per cent higher in real terms than 15 years earlier. Including federal and provincial government expenditures, total policing costs amounted to over $17 billion in 2018, or $ 478 per Canadian. In comparison, primary and secondary public education cost the average Canadian about $ 2,800. So policing is an important but not overwhelming component of government in general.
Among big cities, the outlier is Toronto, where per capita spending peaked early in the last decade and has been declining since. Controlling the Toronto police budget has been a hard slog for politicians. The trend began under Mayor Rob Ford (who had a notoriously complex relationship with the police) but has continued under successive administrations. The city has flatlined the police budget for the past decade at about $ 1.1 billion in inflation- adjusted terms. But population growth has led to the per capita expenditure decline and of course there are calls for deeper cuts and more fundamental reforms.
Statistics Canada collects data on police staffing for most municipalities through its annual “Police Administration Survey.” Staffing ranges very widely across cities, from 122 sworn municipal police officers per 100,000 citizens in Ottawa in 2018 to 225 officers in Montreal.
Staffing rates have been steady in most cities, again with one notable exception: Toronto’s staffing rate has fallen about 25 per cent from its peak in 2010 to just 166 officers per 100,000 residents in 2018. This reflects Toronto’s increasing population but also very substantial reductions in the absolute number of police. Winnipeg and Vancouver have also seen declines in staffing, but these have not been nearly as large or as sustained as Toronto’s.
By far the largest part of police operating budgets is wages, salaries and pension costs for employees. In big Ontario cities, these account for more than 80 per cent of the police operating budget. In most cities, staffing has been stable and budgets have been rising. So average police salaries have been rising, too, even in inflation-adjusted terms. Ontario municipalities report detailed information on police salary costs. That data tells us that Toronto and Ottawa police remuneration per employee ( both sworn plus civilian) rose fully 75 per cent in inflation-adjusted terms between 2003 and 2018, far more than the 20 per cent growth in the median taxpayer’s income over the same period.
The steady rise in police budgets in most cities has occurred despite the continued decrease in crime rates. The secular decline in crime rates is a decades-long phenomenon that likely reflects the aging of the population as well as other factors. On the other hand, crime rates in most cities have been rising since 2015, which is puzzling. But the same phenomenon has been observed in the United States and Australia.
Toronto’s budget and staffing cuts have been made without apparent impact on police effectiveness. Crime rates in Toronto have followed the same path as in other cities where police budgets continue to grow. One standard if imperfect measure of police effectiveness is the “clearance rate” — the percentage of reported crimes leading to an arrest. Toronto’s clearance rate has remained steady at 35 to 40 per cent over time, much as in most other major cities.
What’s the bottom line? Police budgets have been rising in most big cities, while police employment has remained steady, despite the general decrease in crime rates. In Toronto, as population grew over the past decade, the police budget was held constant in real terms and police employment declined. This led to substantial cuts in spending and staffing per resident but so far no divergence from other cities in terms of broad measures of police performance. Defund the police? Over the last decade Toronto did.