On Wednesday, December 18, the Board of Police Commissioners met to discuss the police budgets for the next fiscal year. Unlike the municipality’s other business units, Halifax’s police departments get extra budget scrutiny. Also, unlike other municipal business units, the police have been the subject of not one, not two, but three massive reports about systemic failures of their departments since 2019. As a result of burning a fairly substantial amount of institutional trust and credibility, the city has formalized a new iterative budget process for the police.
At the last police commissioners’ meeting, both police departments gave a preview of their budgets. Halifax Regional Police’s budget is mostly what they spent last year, and they are asking for some new civilian hires and body-worn cameras. The total budget is $101.2 million, which is a 3.3% increase from last year. It includes things like $462,300 for seven civilian positions and $828,000 for body-worn cameras, which would jump to $3.36 million next fiscal year. Also on order is an armoured personnel carrier set to arrive in May, but it could still be cancelled when city council debates the capital budget.
Halifax’s other cops, the RCMP, are asking for a substantial personnel expansion, but their budget was deferred to the next meeting. Once the board hears both budgets and from the public, they’ll send some form of police budgets off to council for approval and inclusion in the coming fiscal year’s municipal budget.
At Wednesday’s meeting, the debate about the budget submitted by Halifax Regional Police kicked off with commissioner Yemi Akindoju, who praised the HRP for their budget—not the amounts in the ledgers, but that the document itself had ledgers at all. As recently as 2021, the HRP published detailed budget documents. But that year, said detail allowed then co-chairs of the East Coast Prison Justice Society, Harry Critchley and Tari Ajadi, to point out that the police spent almost as much on a police horse ($271,600) and polygraph testing ($260,300) as they did on the Housing First program ($561,925). In 2022, the HRP stopped publishing detailed budget documents.
For the past few years, this has drawn the ire of Akindoju, who’s been quite insistent that for the board to do its job, it needs to know exactly how the police are spending their money. As commissioner Akindoju nears the end of his three-year term, this budget is the first in which he’s been able to use his impressive financial bonafides.
He and commissioner Gavin Giles said it was impressive that the police had kept their requests below inflation. The police budget increase is also lower than the population increase in the HRM. Statistically speaking, this means we now have fewer police per person, and we’re spending less for them. Even though there’s an expectation that “defunding the police” is a dramatic slashing of red ink across black numbers, the reality is a lot more mundane. Barring some revolutionary or populist overthrow, this is what defunding the police will look like, so set your expectations accordingly. It’s also what defunding education, healthcare and wages has looked like since the 1980s, and it took 40 years and a pandemic to really notice that defunding.
The RCMP are not taking this defunding well. In the deferred budget, they’re asking for 23 new cops over the next two years. For their part, due almost entirely to the institutional advantages inherent in having a police force integrated into the municipal government that can also be held accountable by its oversight body, the Halifax Regional Police are adapting well to this defunding. These advantages are substantial; for example, having a Public Safety Department means new public safety spending, like civilian crisis response teams, doesn’t have to go on police budgets. Spending that shouldn’t be police spending, like crossing guards, can move to the more appropriate Public Safety Department and reduce police budgets. And things police need, but other municipal emergency responders also need, like mental health support, can be hired for the municipality and offered to all municipal employees, including police. That last one reduces the police budget and allows tax dollars to get more for less. Forewarned that defunding is coming, these advantages should help the HRP avoid the worst of what we’re noticing about those other three defundings.
During the meeting, HRP chief Don MacLean told the commissioners that he had recently been to the annual Christmas party for retired HRP cops. Some of those cops retired last week, some retired 37 years ago. “What we do now on certain things is certainly not what they did,” he told the board. “There’s an accountability piece which is just bigger now, everything becomes a report call. Before, things that just would have been more dealt with, you know, informally. There’s a lot of reasons for that.” One of the big reasons can be found in the RCMP’s budget submissions from two years ago, which explain that a lot of those informal resolutions were violating people’s charter rights. So in order to prevent cops from violating people’s charter rights, processes and reports were created to formalize and record interactions with police, respectively.
This administrative burden makes it wildly inefficient to have police officers doing a lot of modern police work. The modern world is very online and rotten with cameras, and as a result, scouring the internet for clues is a big part of police work. As we all know from TV, the most efficient way to do police work in the modern age is to send the brooding hot cops out to catch the bad guy while the cute, quirky/goth one looks for clues on the internet. This is why the HRP is asking for one Forensic Media Specialist, so Halifax’s cops can call a fun nerd for internet clues, and thus spend more time knocking on doors and brooding.
Halifax considers defunding the police
By the same token, as the police have grown as a service they have more complex logistics, and now say they need more than one quartermaster. Right now, that person is a uniformed officer of the HRP, but the new quartermaster (if approved) would be a civilian position. When the uniformed officer leaves the force or the post, the police are likely to ask for a civilian replacement and move the uniformed salary allocation to a role that genuinely needs to be filled by the police.
Changes like this result in more police capacity for police work while spending less money due to economies of scale and civilians’ lower salaries. It also starts to institutionally define what work needs to be done by police. Defunding, detasking, whatever you want to call it, this is what a sustainable institutional reform looks like in its infancy.
Except for the RCMP.
In the interest of avoiding complacency, this is also what an outlier year would look like in the long lens of history if the HRP were come back and ask for 22 more cops next year, like they did last year.
But in the meantime, the city does genuinely seem to be making a legitimate effort at police reform, and if it is to be successful, the Board of Police Commissioners, council and Halifax as a whole are going to have some pretty grown-up public debates about some pretty big issues like police tanks, body cams and the future of integrated policing. But grown-up debates require more words than are appropriate for Board of Police Commissioners meetings, even if it is the start of budget season.
The public will have a chance to weigh into the debate on Jan 8, 2025, in a virtual meeting scheduled to start at 3pm. People interested in participating in the conversation can contact clerks@halifax.ca to register to at least 24 hours before the start of the meeting. Sometime before then, the RCMP are expected to present their budget to the board. And sometime before that, you can expect to read some deep dives into issues like police tanks, body cams, and the future of integrated policing on thecoast.ca.
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This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.
Defunding is a trigger word for alot of people. I’m for re-allocating funds more appropriately to better serve the public 🙂