Police seek additional eight officers in 2020
Staffing request tied to opening of new safe consumption site in Pleasant Hill
The Saskatoon Police Service wants to hire eight additional police officers to staff a community mobilization unit to patrol the area around the new safe consumption site in Pleasant Hill.
The force has requested a special meeting with the city’s board of police commissioners on Nov. 6 to seek approval for the officers. The request would be in addition to the three new officer positions in the budget it presented to the police board in September. The police budget approved by the board is up for final council approval.
The supervised consumption site on 20th Street West, a project led by AIDS Saskatoon, is expected to open in early 2020. The new police unit is projected to add $828,200 to the 2020 budget and $807,600 to the 2021 budget, which the force views as the lowest-risk option of the three presented in a new report.
The city ’s overall proposed budget, announced this week, calls for a 3.23 per cent property tax increase in 2020 and 3.54 per cent increase in 2021.
The other two options in the report would be to add four additional officers next year or use existing resources at no additional cost.
On Thursday, police Chief Troy Cooper said the risk of using existing resources would be that if call volumes increase in that area, police would use existing resources in the area or pull officers from other parts of the city.
“And simply we’re just at the point where we just don’t have the resources to dedicate to it (patrolling the safe consumption site)," he said.
At the end of September, Cooper invoked a clause in the police union’s collective agreement that allows him to make emergency scheduling or assignment changes, in response to the high number of calls for service.
Cooper said the new officers would also respond to some of the existing challenges in the neighbourhood’s residential area, business area and around St. Paul’s Hospital. He said the additional of the eight officers is also a response to the higher call volumes police have seen this year.
And simply we’re just at the point where we just don’t have the resources to dedicate to it
Police plan to continue seeking funding from other levels of government to cover the cost of the added officers, he said.