Focus policing on real crime

With Saskatoon recording its fifth homicide since January, 14 incidents of gunfire reported already for 2015 and the number of gun-related offences on a steady trajectory upward in recent years, it is clear that crime in a booming Saskatoon is taking on a different complexion.

While the traditional mayhem inflicted by such weapons as knives and even machetes continues in Saskatoon, violence involving guns is becoming a more frequent occurrence. Police Chief Clive Weighill describes the gun phenomenon as “foreign” to Saskatoon and attributes it to arrivals from locales such as Vancouver and Toronto who are cashing in on the city’s new prosperity and turning it into a hotbed for gangs and drugs.

Chief Weighill’s most recent move was to announce the creation of a new gangs-and-guns unit within his department. The announcement came within a few weeks of the chief reassigning to patrol duties 16 officers out of his police service’s gangs, vice and traffic units among others, in response to community demands to do something about “aggressive” panhandlers in the downtown.

He also used the opportunity to state emphatically that the service needs 10 additional officers “immediately” to keep on top of the increasing crime.

Whether he is engaging in some departmental personnel manoeuvering with the creation of the new gangs-and-guns unit, or if he is engaging in a chess match with a city council that balked at budget time at giving him eight additional officers and whittled that down to four, Chief Weighill has made a strong argument that Saskatoon needs to bolster its policing ranks.

The ratio of police to population has declined from 198 officers per 100,000 citizens in 2010 to 181 per 100,000 today. The chief would like the number at 185 because below that level, police start to lose visibility. As he told SP columnist Les MacPherson, “After you start to lose control of a community, it’s hard to get it back.”

While councillors faced with unpopular property tax increases can demand that the police service become more efficient in deploying officers to ensure a safe community, delivering on the mandate becomes tough when the number of additional cops hired fails to keep pace with population growth in a booming city.

The problem is further compounded when council exerts pressure on the police service to use tougher enforcement of bylaws to try to resolve social problems that manifest themselves in such things as panhandling and homelessness.

Even by the estimates of The Partnership, the downtown business lobby, there are fewer than 20 persistent beggars in the city core. To divert 16 police officers to patrol the streets to assuage public perceptions about safety is a misuse of a valuable resource.

Police certainly should be working with downtown agencies such as The Lighthouse to fend off problems with its residents wandering the streets, but the solution isn’t to create and try to have police enforce bylaws that set buffer zones around certain businesses or even require panhandlers to stand still when begging.

Chief Weighill is right to consider the panhandling problem overblown. He has bigger crimes to tackle and needs enough resources to get the job done.

The editorials that appear in this space represent the opinion of The Star Phoenix. They are unsigned because they do not necessarily represent the personal views of the writers. The positions taken in the editorials are arrived at through discussion among the members of the newspaper’s editorial board, which operates independently from the news departments of the paper.