Like most of Halifax’s recent budgets, deciding this year’s budget is not easy. Councillors are aware that Haligonians are struggling in record numbers so they’re trying to make sure every tax dollar spent is spent well. Or at least, that’s what they say they want.
The Halifax Regional Police are asking for a few things this year in their $101.2 million budget: $462,000 for seven civilian employees and $847,900 for body cams. This body cam money will jump to $3.3 million next year as the program gets fully implemented. The RCMP are asking for $4 million worth of cops to expand their coverage in the outlying areas of the HRM, places like Beechville, Musquidoboit Harbour and Eastern Passage.
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Over the past few months, the Board of Police Commissioners has held many budget meetings in which the police have explained why they feel they need these positions. The HRP want civilians to detask their officers from non-police work. The RCMP don’t think they have enough cops. As for body cams, those were inevitable as soon as the RCMP got them, but for the HRP the real benefit is the digital evidence management upgrades required by the body cams. This upgrade should save a lot of police (and crown attorney) work hours currently being burned on archaic digital evidence capabilities.
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Councillor Shawn Cleary, who has a long track record of strong police budget debates, had another strong one when he asked his peers to consider sending the budgets back to the Board of Police Commissioners to see if this new spending was really needed. He said that if council was serious about keeping taxes low, then no budget could be above scrutiny. Over the course of a three-minute question, Cleary pointed out that according to the HRP’s budget submissions, the HRP’s workload has been relatively constant for the better part of a decade. He pointed out that police budgets in the past decade have increased even as the force’s workload has stagnated.
Is it possible that municipal resources spent on policing could be better allocated? The closest the Board has come to analyzing the HRM’s police resourcing split was in last year’s budget debates when the two police forces used a “cop to pop” ratio to justify their request for increased police spending. Even though this ratio is a highly flawed metric to justify more police spending, the debates generated this staff report, which highlights that the HRP parts of the HRM have more police officers per capita than the national average and the RCMP parts have about half the police officers than the national average. It is likely that Halifax is spending too much on the HRP but not enough on the RCMP, but we won’t know for sure until Halifax’s work on how to integrate our police forces is finished, which is not expected for a few years. Until that happens, we can’t know how many police officers we need where or what equipment our integrated police force may need in the future.
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Nevertheless, councillor Becky Kent, who also sits on the Board of Police Commissioners, assured her peers that the Board did their due diligence and that these police budgets were the best the board could come up with.
Councillors Cleary, Sam Austin, Patty Cuttell, Laura White and Virginia Hinch voted to give police budgets more scrutiny, but lost.
After that, both police budgets passed with only Cleary and Austin voting no.
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.