Joined: May 2010
Posts: 140
How many?
6/14/2016 at 6:22 PM
I see lots of comments about the cops having to do more but have to ask the question: how many cops do you think are working at any one time? Having some knowledge about the city and the departments, perhaps we can shed some light on this to put it in context. Gone are the days of a cop on every corner, I can say with certainty.
BPS runs 4 shifts of uniform cops that average 10 officers and 8 of those being cops that actually go to calls and 2 supervisors. Of those 8, there will be 1 or 2 on holidays, - especially in summer (think family) - maybe someone sick, or on training. So you have maybe 5 or 6 on the road. Now factor in file work, court time, etc. & you might be down to 4 or 5. Now calls come in and if it is anything besides just taking a report (like a break and enter) probably at least two cops go so you have maybe 2 or 3 left patrolling waiting for the next call to come in. I don't think writing tickets is a big priority for the street cops. And according to the BPS annual report, they had somewhere around 34,000 calls for service if I remember correctly.
Then the traffic section only has 3 or 4 officers I think to work 7 das a week. They work mostly days and look after accidents, hit & runs, special enforcement, do the serious investigations where they reconstruct the accident, go to court,and all of the associated jobs. If there is more than 1 on the street at any time, I would be very surprised.
The detectives, school cops, community cops, community mobilization cops (Brandon Sun article) aren't going to be giving out tickets when they have their own job responsibilities.
And I don't know how many senior officers there are for running the police but of the 85 or so oficers, I bet there are less than 50 who are street cops and we already figured out how thin they're stretched.
Now, maybe someone can help us out here. How many km's of roads are in the city to patrol for the 3 or 4 cops that are free to patrol? Oh, and that's if they don't pick up an impaired that takes 2 officers off the street and 3 or more hours of paperwork.
StatsCan can likely tell us if we have too many, too few, or just the right number of cops for our population. Can anyone find that info? I bet it shows we're below the national average.
So if you want to see more cops on the street writing tickets, call your city councillor and pressure them to hire more. Call the Chief of Police and get more cops on the street instead of in schools, sitting on Committees that don't do anything, and doing special events (eg. walk a mile in her shoes). The police work for us so let's tell them what we want to see as our priority!!
This is one man's opinion!