What are police spending money on?
CBC has a good, detailed piece Friday on what police cost overruns are paying for, even as their budget continues to rise.
And yet, the police Équipe de concertation communautaire is set to shut down next month from lack of funding?
Ian 21:10 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
I actually posted this link on page 2, thinking nobody would appreciate my constant carping about the city overspending on cops.
I think this passage is the most on-point:
“Although Montreal does have fewer officers today per capita than it did a decade ago, it still has more officers per capita than cities like Vancouver and Edmonton, which have higher rates of severe crime, according to data from Statistics Canada.
Massimiliano Mulone, associate professor in the department of criminology at the Université de Montréal, thinks Montreal’s police force is far from understaffed.
However, the amount of overtime and the number of tasks they take on, from responding to calls involving mental health to homelessness, might cause fatigue and stress, he says, making them feel there is a need for an even larger police force.”
This is the whole point to defunding the police – not that we should not have any police at all, but that we are inflating the police budget to make them do things that would be better performed by other community services – basically losing money on worse services.
Also, this:
“(Mulone) says there are other ways to roll back spending, such as stopping the practice of having highly paid officers do some forms of administrative work or direct traffic.”
Well, duh.
Kate 23:18 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
Ian, that is so well put I want to call it out:
This is the whole point to defunding the police – not that we should not have any police at all, but that we are inflating the police budget to make them do things that would be better performed by other community services – basically losing money on worse services.
jeather 23:27 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
If anyone ran for mayor on this, I would vote for them in a heartbeat. I am beyond unimpressed with Plante on this topic.
Joey 16:25 on 2024-03-02 Permalink
@kate that’s why “defund the police” is a terrible slogan
bob 16:42 on 2024-03-02 Permalink
Overtime is the contemporary form of police corruption. It is part of a larger trend. As old-time corruption becomes more difficult, stuff like plain extortion, the corrupt slip into legal forms of fraud and abuse, and in the case of police continent-wide that has been excessive overtime and hyper-defensive unions. It was formerly a small-ish percentage of police employees who put in for the excessive overtime, skewing the numbers, but it has become widespread, because it is not seen as obviously fraudulent or corrupt (if it is seen at all), and police get away with everything because no one polices the police.
I don’t have data at hand, but the last time I looked there was an association between the highest amounts of fraudulent overtime (employees claiming to have worked 70, 80, 90 hour weeks) and things like complaints for excessive force and other misbehaviour.
In line with the “defunding” sentiment, and mirroring what Ted Rutland said in the atricle, here’s a recent quote from the Comptroller of New York City, whose police overspent their overtime budget by 93% (about $1 billion over) in 2022: “If New York City had unlimited cash, it would be lovely to allow teachers unlimited overtime to stay after school to help every kid learn to read or pay social workers unlimited overtime to help counsel New Yorkers struggling with mental illness. But other agencies aren’t allowed to show total disregard for their overtime budget, and we can’t afford for the NYPD to do so year after year.” But, of course, they do, and so does the SPVM.
Ian 18:54 on 2024-03-02 Permalink
I’m not even allowed to have a substitute teacher if I’m sick for a day. There are no “budget overruns” for most public workers. I get the argument that police are an essential service – but not all of their services are essential, and as Mulone pointed out, not all police work falls within essential services either.
If we actually had social workers doing sociall work (for instance) it would probably even lead to a reduction in crime.