Police funding has increased year over year. In 2019, the police funding from the City of Edmonton was $378 million. By 2026 it will grow to $475 million.
The Edmonton Police Service's budget is expected to grow by 12.4% between 2023 and 2026. For context, the Edmonton Public Library's budget is supposed to increase by 4% between 2023 and 2026.
How are the Edmonton Police leadership spending the money?
I moved the following motion which was passed by City Council.
That the Edmonton Police Commission obtain information from the Edmonton Police Service on the impacts of the Edmonton Police Service Funding Formula, specifically addressing what services and projects the enhanced funding under this formula has enabled or will allow in the future and provide a report to Council.
Motion Passed: Sohi, Wright, Knack, Stevenson, Salvador, Janz, Tang
Opposed: Cartmell, Hamilton, Rice, Principe
I was disappointed that some of my colleagues would even speak and vote against receiving more information about how our tax dollars are being spent.
Even those who support the expenditures should want to know -- and proudly celebrate -- how the funding is being spent, no? We could all benefit from more transparency, accountability, and oversight. More information allows us to compare return on investment and ensure every single tax dollar is maximizing public benefit.
There are some negative political actors in the community who are attempting to perpetuate a narrative that the police are underfunded. When you look at an annual budget growth of almost $100 million dollars, this is clearly incorrect.
Edmonton has a funding formula which guarantees an increase every year. The police are the largest component of the city budget and the largest part of your city property taxes. Taxpayers deserve to know how funding is being spent. We all deserve to feel and be safe in our community and deserve transparent information about what is being done to enhance safety.
I wrote about the problems of accountability in police funding previously at: https://www.michaeljanz.ca/more_money_more_police_not_necessarily
Last year the EPS leadership were criticized for spending more on public relations instead of front-line policing. https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/edmonton-police-communications-spending
The Edmonton Police Commission has been critical of providing an audit plan to city council and their auditor jointly reports to both the Chief of Police and the Police Commission, unlike the independent auditor at City Hall who only reports to City Council, not the City manager: https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/keren-tang-edmonton-police-commission-audit
Policing expert Professor Temitope Oriola recently wrote an article about the need to deploy police resources more effectively: https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/columnists/temitope-oriola-lets-deploy-eps-resources-more-effectively
Firstly, the majority of calls are not necessarily matters of life and death. They are mostly for issues like shoplifting and vandalism (a combined 89.1 per cent).
Secondly, at a policy level, these numbers suggest a need to engage other occupations in dealing with many of the social issues we have somehow managed to drop on the laps of police like houselessness, drug addiction, mental-health episodes, drug addiction, among others.
Thirdly, having one or two officers in patrol vehicles is standard law-enforcement practice. Scholarship on how police time is utilized is vast. In the last 50 years in the field of criminology, the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment led to “consistent evidence of the lack of effects of any consequence on crime.”
The study suggests that hotspots policing may be a better strategy. Overall, McFee’s exit should spur reasonable and fact-based policy conversations on effective deployment of police resources.
