Breakenridge: Adding more police not the panacea that governments expect

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Not surprisingly, there were no obvious objections to last week’s provincial announcement of 100 new police officers for Calgary and Edmonton.

To be sure, there are many questions about where these officers will come from, when and how they’ll actually be put into service, and whether there will be financial support from the Alberta government to cover these new positions in the future.

However, it’s unrealistic to think this move will have a measurable effect on crime rates, which was the whole intent behind the announcement. Whatever usefulness the additional manpower might represent, this is no panacea when it comes to crime rates.

For one, there’s no reason to think that crime has escalated because of a lack of police officers. We’ve had lower crime rates in recent years and it wasn’t because of police service staffing levels.

When it comes to crime, there are many relevant factors in both the lead-up to and the aftermath of police involvement. The nature of police work typically means responding after the fact: interviewing victims and witnesses, gathering evidence and hopefully making arrests. But what led to that crime occurring in the first place? And what will happen to that offender once the officer’s work is done? If we’re not addressing those two sides of the equation, we’re not really going to solve any of our crime problems.

The point has been made several times about the need for bail reform, and the frustration for police officers in frequently dealing with repeat offenders. This is a legitimate concern and a problem that is clearly stretching police resources. Bail reform can be useful in this regard, but do we have space to hold those who are denied bail? Do we have the resources to make sure cases are heard in a timely fashion? What about more parole officers to deal with those on the back end of the system?

It’s also crucial that we understand what led to this recent uptick in crime rates so that ultimately there are fewer problems these officers have to deal with in the first place. Police aren’t there to deal with issues around mental health, addiction and poverty, but if we neglect these issues, they end up becoming police problems.

Having fewer police officers certainly isn’t the answer to any of this. But we should temper our expectations of what we expect to result from the hiring of more officers.

Winnipeg, for example, typically has higher-than-average rates of serious crime and also typically has one of the highest ratios of officers to population among Canada’s big cities. One could argue that Winnipeg needs more police officers to handle its crime rates, but it’s not an encouraging correlation.

A 2014 study for the Fraser Institute by economist Livio Di Matteo did find that a drop in crime in the first decade of this century coincided with increases in police expenditures. However, when looking at the longer view, he notes that after adjusting for population growth, police resources “are now where they were in the early 1990s, whereas crime rates have declined 46 per cent since 1991.”

Moreover, Di Matteo found a rather mixed picture when looking at cities and their respective crime rates and police budgets, noting that “the relationship between greater police resources and crime rates is also not an inverse one — indeed, police resource measures and crime rates can often be positively correlated.”

There’s no doubt that rising crime can add to the workload of officers, so hiring more police isn’t an unreasonable response to what’s been happening in Calgary and Edmonton.

However, this announcement wasn’t about manageable workloads; this was very much about crime reduction. If that’s what we’re expecting governments to deliver, we should be demanding much more than this.

“Afternoons with Rob Breakenridge” airs weekdays from 12:30 to 3 p.m. on QR Calgary and 2 to 3 p.m. on 630CHED

rob.breakenridge@corusent.com

Twitter: @RobBreakenridge