Pubdate: Thu, 19 Feb 2004
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Page: A14
Copyright: 2004, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.globeandmail.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: John Barber

FINDING FUNDS TO STAY TOUGH ON CRIME

Police Chief Julian Fantino opened the defence of his $691-million budget 
request with a spirited barrage of statistical propaganda, citing 
everything from the marijuana-growing growth industry to the current number 
of file boxes required to complete a homicide investigation.

He trotted out such traditional bugbears as gun crime and the 
"revolving-door justice system" while offering new revelations about his 
officers' increasing volunteer activities and United Way contributions, all 
in a multi-coloured blaze of ominously mounting bar graphs and dangerously 
explosive pie charts.

But he needn't have bothered. As police board vice-chair Pam McConnell 
noted in a somewhat acidic introduction to the chief's presentation, little 
can be done to control policing costs in Toronto. Most of the overrun in 
the requested budget, which is $47-million higher than what budget chief 
David Soknacki wants to pay, is the unavoidable result of the officers' 
latest lucrative labour contract. Labour costs account for 92 per cent of 
the operating budget, she noted, which means that the city budget committee 
will have to find its $47-million savings from the $55-million that's left. 
Short of cancelling every police program apart from the payroll, it's not 
possible.

The other problem, which is almost too obvious to mention, is that people 
want the services police provide. There is not a single elected politician 
in Toronto, at any level of government, who would dare to recommend a 
reduction in the service's current 5,260-person cohort of uniformed police 
officers -- or that it go soft on gun crime or child porn, not to mention 
the poisoning of yuppie dogs.

So yesterday's budget meeting, which many less-than-realistic reformers 
anticipated as a daring raid on an overstuffed treasury, scuttled quickly 
off to the margins, focusing on relatively picayune issues of "gapping," 
overtime, court costs and whatnot -- all the stones bled dry in years past, 
to little avail.

Could a hardheaded cost-cutter excise several million dollars in 
unnecessary expenditure from the police budget? Of course he could. The 
same is true of every other large government bureaucracy in this country. 
It just never happens.

Chief Fantino said "all possible efficiencies" have already been achieved. 
So there. End of story.

But fond delusions live on. "We're not here to cut badly needed services," 
Mr. Soknacki said at the end of yesterday's meeting. "We are here to find 
efficiencies, savings and ways to do a better job."

Realistically, the budget maker's only solid option is to cut services -- 
or, at minimum, to control the rate at which existing services expand. 
Recent police initiatives to control child porn and other sex crimes, which 
were subsidized by provincial grants now due to expire, are clearly 
vulnerable this year.

The sharply rising cost of controlling Internet-based child porn was one of 
the prime budget pressures Chief Fantino cited in his presentation. The 
hard question now is how far Toronto taxpayers can afford to go in pursuing 
technologically savvy pedophiles.

The chief's presentation also highlighted the increasing financial 
challenge of controlling marijuana cultivation, raising another obvious but 
fruitless question: Why bother? Until they license it, however, pot will be 
a source of increasing costs, not revenue.

But the grow-op problem does suggest one cost-recovery measure that could 
be more palatable. Canadian law gives the state broad rights to seize the 
proceeds of crime, but local police forces rarely if ever use them in 
connection with low-level grow ops. If they did choose to seize assets 
connected to grow-ops, one private-sector investigator familiar with the 
legislation said, "they would get a pretty good return for their efforts."

"Canada is light years behind the Americans in this stuff," criminal lawyer 
Paul Copeland added, "and that is probably good news."

But with taxpayers unwilling to pay cash up front for the police services 
they demand, more of that stuff looks like the future to me.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom