TORONTO -- The recent furor over comments by Toronto's outgoing deputy chief of police about cutting officers to save money focused the spotlight anew on policing costs that keep rising even as Canada's crime rate plunges and its economy sputters.
While communities across the country grapple with police budgets that in some cases are eating up to 50 per cent of their operating budgets, solutions to what's become a perennial headache have proven elusive.
"It's been a very frustrating discussion or dialogue that's occurred in this country over the last couple of years," says Tom Stamatakis, head of the national association that advocates for frontline officers.
"You've got a lot of people wading in with lots of opinions and personal views or biases around the whole cost-of-policing issue, but most of that dialogue is not informed by good research and evaluation."
One area of broad agreement is the lack of consensus on what constitutes cost-effective policing and how best to measure whether Canadian taxpayers are getting a solid bang for the more than 13 billion bucks they spend each year on what some see as an ever-thickening thin blue line. (more...)
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