Prince George city council is taking the prudent approach to the RCMP request for additional funding for more officers. The mayor and councillors are taking extra time to study the proposal and are expected to make a decision during budget hearings Wednesday.
RCMP Supt. Warren Brown has asked for the money to hire seven more Mounties over the next three years, with the first three officers coming on board next year. Those three officers alone would add nearly half a million dollars to the annual budget. As it is, city council has already approved an $840,000 increase for next year, just to maintain police services at current levels.
The difficulty with the decision to boost spending is that it's permanent. As Coun. Terri McConnachie rightly pointed out, "once an increase is made, it's never going to go back." The only thing that gets taxpayers more upset than raising taxes is cutting cops.
In the end, council should compromise. Hire three more officers over the next three years, one extra member per year. That would allow the local detachment to continue to support new initiatives, such as the domestic violence unit and the Car 60 partnership with Northern Health to address mental illness issues, while also encouraging Brown and his team to manage their resources carefully.
Increasing the budget is one thing. Brown's boss, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, was arguing last week that the Mounties need more powers and shouldn't have to obtain a warrant before demanding subscriber information from Internet service providers. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled last June that a judge, not the police, will decide when it's appropriate for law enforcement to access customer data.
Paulson hauled out all of the online bogeymen, stressing child predators, to support his case, while neglecting to mention how not having to produce a warrant would help catch more bad guys online or explaining how the burden of getting a warrant makes the police less effective in their work. It was just a rehash of the tired "stands with us or with the child pornographers" argument.
If Paulson had been asking for more cops to fight cybercrime, that's one thing. What he's asking for, however, is for Charter rights to be curtailed, with no guarantee that it will make one iota of difference in reducing online criminal activity.
When it comes to online activity, the RCMP is speaking out of both sides of its mouth. On one hand, it is constantly (and rightfully) encouraging people to guard their personal information carefully while online, to keep privacy and encryption settings high, to watch what they post on social media and to be vigilant for online scams and hacking. On the other hand, the country's top cop resents needing a judge's approval before circumventing around these exact same precautions.
Shamelessly, Paulson pointed to the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand having the same problems Canada does with cybercrime and overzealous courts hampering police. Those four same countries, along with Canada, are the members of the intelligence-gathering alliance Five Eyes. As the top-secret National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 showed, the Five Eyes members get around legal restrictions on spying on their own citizens by getting the other members to do it for them and then sharing what they find.
Seen in that light, Paulson is only pushing for a little piece of the action the Canadian Security Intelligence Service already has. He would like the Mounties to have some of the same kind of back-door access Canada's spy agency enjoys with the same lack of judicial oversight.
Whether it's asking for more officers or more power, the argument from the police is always the same. There is a clear and present danger and we're doing the best we can but we need more. Too bad our hands are tied by penny-pinching politicians and/or civil rights advocates.
That requires looking at each ask on its face value.
Wanting more officers to support existing programs producing measurable results is worth consideration. Support can come in various ways, not just by throwing money at the problems with higher taxes. Wanting more power to skirt around legal safeguards and using the safety of vulnerable kids for leverage is little more than fearmongering to disguise a cynical grab for power.
