Don’t spread needless fear
Toronto is a remarkably safe city, and the tough day-to-day work carried out by thousands of police officers is a big part of keeping it that way.
Yet the Toronto Police Association, the bargaining agent for the city’s officers, is acting in a way that risks undermining public trust in the force and creating unnecessary concern about how safe the city really is.
Union president Mike McCormack declared this week that his members are at a “crisis point” due to overwork caused by staffing and budget cuts.
The union launched a website to draw attention to the fact that Toronto has 500 fewer officers than it did back in 2010. McCormack warned that officers are leaving the Toronto force in droves because of stress and low morale, and said that’s causing concern about “the potential to public safety and officer safety.”
At the same time, he advised officers to make sure they take proper lunch breaks and don’t rush to meet an “arbitrary timeline” — a barely disguised call to work-to-rule.
McCormack has a very specific job to do in representing his union membership. But all this amounts to scaremongering at a time when there’s no hard evidence that public safety is being compromised. The union ought to cut it out.
For his part, Chief Mark Saunders has dismissed these claims as a “sound bite” he’s heard before and disputes any suggestion that rank-and-file police officers are on the edge.
And Saunders points out that, regardless of what the union says, all signs are that officers are acting professionally and not doing anything that would put public safety at risk. That’s to their credit — especially at a time when police are at the centre of controversies ranging from whether they’re welcome at the Pride parade to how well they handle confrontations involving people with mental health issues.
The real issue, of course, is money. Toronto’s police budget has been rising relentlessly and now tops $1 billion, with 90 per cent going to salaries. The city is under constant pressure to keep costs under control and there’s no reason to exempt police spending at a time when crime rates are at record low levels.
Earlier this year, Chief Saunders laid out his proposed path forward in the report of the force’s Transformational Taskforce, which sets out a reasonable plan to reorient the police service. They include an end to the controversial TAVIS program in at-risk neighbourhoods; assigning officers to neighbourhoods for a minimum of three years in order to build better connections to the community; and having uniformed staff concentrate on the most serious police matters, as opposed to bylaw enforcement.
For the police association, the biggest concern is staffing. The task force report proposes $100 million in savings over three years, with most of it coming from a three-year freeze on promotions and new hires.
The goal is to reduce the force through attrition, which seems to be working. According to reports, the 2017 police budget saw the number of deployed uniformed officers drop from 5,224 to 5,072. Those numbers are targeted to fall to 4,912 in 2018 and 4,767 by 2019.
That is no doubt unsettling for officers, and especially for the union. But the fact is that the rate of most types of serious crime has continued to fall in recent years despite a reduction in the number of uniformed officers. There’s no reason to believe there’s anything like a crisis in policing in Toronto.
In the current war of words, McCormack maintains he has tried to raise his concerns but they have fallen on deaf ears, while Mayor John Tory has replied that the police association has never been involved in any of the transformational discussions. This adversarial approach does not help either side; better communication and co-operation is surely necessary to help modernize policing in the city.
The bottom line is that the police union should stop the posturing and scaremongering. It should work with Saunders and the police board to find a way forward that keeps Toronto safe while keeping costs under control.
The real issue, of course, is money. Toronto’s police budget has been rising and now tops $1 billion