Social service downloading lands on policing

Municipal taxpayers bearing the cost, Sarath Peiris says.

Municipal taxpayers for too long have been forced to pick up the tab, through ever-rising police service budgets, for many health and social service challenges whose costs senior governments have been happy to download to civic property owners.

Police leaders in Saskatoon, Regina and elsewhere have been stressing at least for a decade that the duties of their officers now extend well beyond law enforcement and public safety to tackle everything from homelessness to family dysfunction to social ills to health problems such as drug addiction and mental illness.

With the scope of policing duties expanding along with the population of major centres, rare is an annual police budget request that doesn’t include a case for hiring additional officers to handle the workload. City councillors are often reluctant to reject these calls for police expansion, which are justified as essential to maintaining public safety.

At an annual cost of more than $100,000 per additional officer (including benefits), the policing tab adds up quickly. Today, 21.5 cents of every property tax dollar in Saskatoon pay for policing, with Regina close behind at 20 cents — figures in line with that of many other cities.

With tax-averse senior governments keeping a lid on social program costs — the Saskatchewan government’s latest budget of June 15 being no exception, even in the midst of a pandemic that hits hardest at impoverished and marginalized persons — municipalities are dealing with the fallout through added policing costs and other community programs.

Certainly, there have been some laudable innovations led by police services, such as the Police and Crisis Team (PACT), which operates within both the Regina and Saskatoon police services.

PACT features two, two-person teams of a constable and mental health worker responding to mental health and addiction crisis calls, and has proven its worth in diverting people from emergency departments and courts.

SPS also has created a Vulnerable Persons Unit to provide a co-ordinated response to help persons at heightened risk of harm. This includes PACT and a multi-agency group known as HUB (that identifies and works with individuals or families whose risk can’t be resolved by a single agency such as Social Services).

However, such programs are relatively rare across municipalities, and are frequently dependent on the resources available and the ability and willingness of property owners to continue shouldering ever-increasing local taxes. The result is a vast disparity in supports provided to people at risk across the Saskatchewan and across Canada.

While provincial and federal governments might argue that they pay at least part of the costs for such programs through the participation of staff in their health and social services departments, the fundamental point remains that access to adequate medical and mental health care, or family and youth supports should not depend on the community one calls home.

In the wake of recent spectacularly shocking episodes of brutal and criminal conduct by some police officers against Black and Indigenous people in Canada and the United States, civil rights activists and ordinary citizens alike are demanding that police services be “defunded,” with more money going toward improving social programs, education and health services, and anti-racism strategies that mitigate the root causes of problems that bring too many marginalized people in contact with police and the justice system.

However, the challenge goes beyond simply taking money away from local policing and funnelling it into provincial social programs.

Despite Premier Scott Moe’s recent statement that restructuring police services is not being actively considered, it’s just what is needed.

Rethinking how policing is done and where police responsibilities lie is needed in an era when such things as liberalized pot laws bring into question whether the drug enforcement units supplemented with provincial funding over the years need to be as large. Further decriminalization of drugs and treating addiction as a health issue is a cheaper and more effective solution than arrests and imprisonment.

Rather than have police services lead efforts to deal with the social fallouts of inadequate public policies, it’s senior governments that need to take the responsibility, with police help as a last resort. The costs and benefits should accrue to all citizens, not urban taxpayers in a few locales.