Helps, Desjardins endorse effort to remake VicPD

The mayors of Victoria and Esquimalt are embracing a Victoria police department plan to remake itself in the face of staffing and budget pressures.

Strategies in the plan include shifting additional officers to the front lines, adjusting patrol shifts to align with peak call times, no longer responding to certain types of calls and hiring unarmed special municipal constables to ease the workload on sworn officers.

Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps said Wednesday the measures will result in better deployment of resources and increased public safety. She predicted that some of the report’s innovative ideas will be adopted by other police agencies facing similar cost pressures.

“For me, I feel quite excited about the transformation report,” Helps said. “I do think it will be picked up eventually as best practices across the country.”

She noted that Victoria Police Chief Del Manak has plenty of company when it comes to demanding more money for his department.

“If you talk to any police chief in this country, they would say: ‘We don’t have enough staff and we don’t have enough resources,’ ” she said. “That is a fact of policing of Canada in the 21st century, without question. So I think the importance of this report is: What kinds of outcomes do we want police agencies to achieve?”

Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins, who co-chairs the police board with Helps, said the board reviewed and approved the transformation report. “We asked Chief Manak to think outside the box and he is delivering,” she said. “We will continue to oversee this as it rolls out.”

Manak said in an interview that the department can no longer operate as it has in the past. The department is down about 40 officers due to a variety of factors, such as physical injuries, stress and parental leaves, and new recruits training at the Justice Institute’s Police Academy in the Lower Mainland.

“I have 208 officers that are trying to do the work of 249,” he said. “It is not going well.”

The transformation report notes it is becoming routine for the patrol division to have 15 to 20 calls waiting for service, which leads to increased wait times.

“I don’t have the resources,” Manak said. “I don’t have the budget. I don’t have the political will to kind of manage this. So we are going to have to look at cuts, reductions, efficiencies in how we police in a much more complex environment than we’ve ever seen before.”

The Victoria police department received a 3.2 per cent increase to its nearly $54-million budget this year, but its request for additional officers was denied.