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. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom