Keeping up with everyday policing while also juggling crime-reduction has the Prince George RCMP stretched too thin, according to the officer in charge of the local detachment.
On Monday afternoon,
Supt. Warren Brown pitched a request to city council's finance and audit committee for funding for seven additional officers over the next three years.
Prince George has a "staggeringly high" crime rate per thousand people, in comparison to other B.C. communities of similar size and demographic, said Brown. And while that's a consistent trend, it also means the city's police have less time to spend on crime-reduction activities than the other communities, he said.
Any new initiatives, such as the Car 60 program (which partners with Northern Health to deal with mental health calls), poach personnel from the general duty section, said Brown.
There's a convoluted trio of numbers that make up the RCMP budget - the quantity of RCMP members the city can have through its contract with the provincial government, the amount of members the city budgets for and the number of RCMP officers that are actually on the payroll.
As it's been for the past decade, the contracted amount of members is 128, while the city has budgeted for 121 since 2009.
The only time the detachment has met the budgeted amount of members was in 2010.
Last year, the detachment asked for and received an on-paper increase to the contract amount from 128 to 135 in an attempt to provide enough so-called hard vacancies (actual empty positions, as opposed to positions vacated due to parental leave or injury, or soft vacancies) to fill those 121 spots.
On Monday, Brown presented his detachment's new request to go up to 143 contracted spots with the hope of filling 128 budgeted positions over the next three years, at a total cost of $1.14 million. The three members in 2016 would replenish the three officers seconded for the downtown safety unit.
"We at one time had 16 members on watch," said Brown.
"With leaves and whatnot, we're down to about 10 right now and they're spending about 100 per cent of their time just responding to calls."
Two more officers in 2017 would make up for the two members required for the Car 60 program and the last two requested for 2018 would prop up the domestic violence unit (which has gone down to one member from the original two) and to supplement the urban aboriginal constable.
The $500,000 ask for 2016 amounts to a roughly 0.5 per cent increase to the city's tax levy, if the city decides to accommodate the RCMP's request.
City council will make a decision on the request during the first budget deliberation meeting on Nov. 25.
