DWINDLING POLICE FORCES PUT ALL OF US AT RISK

Those heartened by funding in Tuesday's federal budget for 2,500
additional police officers are naive. Parliamentary testimony this
week from three top law enforcement bosses reveals police no longer
have the capacity to deal with the sort of crime and emergencies
facing the country.

The Senate committee on national security and defence heard the
unhappy tidings from former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli,
Edmonton police Chief Michael Boyd and Ontario Provincial Police
Commissioner Julian Fantino.

"The federal government in their platform speeches suggested they were
embracing a law-and-order agenda. Where is the meat?" asked
Zaccardelli, asserting that double the 2,500 new police would be
required just to maintain the current roster of 64,000 sworn officers.

In 1975, Canada had 206 officers for every 100,000 people; today the
number is 195.

"That is the smallest number of police officers to population ratio in
any of the 25 major developed countries in the world," noted
Zaccardelli, forced from his RCMP job in 2006 amid controversy over
the Maher Arar affair.

At the moment, police are facing "a perfect storm," he said. Between
40 and 60 per cent of senior police officers are facing retirement, at
a time when few young people appear interested in law enforcement work.

"You hear some people talk in black and white terms about how crime is
down in the country and why do we need the number of police officers
that we have," Boyd observed.

But, he said, police work has changed dramatically.

Today, police deal with Internet crimes, often involving child
pornography; identity theft; terrorism threats; national health
emergencies; marijuana growing operations; international crime
syndicates; human trafficking; contraband smuggling; and youth and
street gangs.

"We have become a mile wide and an inch deep," Boyd
said.

And new court rulings and laws put additional demands on police in
terms of how they carry out their work. In the past decade, for
instance, the time it took to process an impaired driving charge
increased 250 per cent.

Zaccardelli told the senators: "The bottom line is that there has been
a 10-per-cent reduction in real capacity to do police work over the
last decade."

He described RCMP ability to respond to terrorism incidents on
Canadian soil as "seriously deficient."

Zaccardelli warned that, while two years ago police were able to
address about 30 per cent of the identifiable organized crime groups
in Canada, "I'm afraid it is probably getting worse. We are talking
about huge gaps that have to be overcome."

He also questioned why police force administration and activities
aren't nationally integrated to eliminate duplication and allow for
co-ordination of activities. One example of the headaches this causes:
Police pensions aren't transferable between municipal and provincial
forces, limiting job movement.

On the operational side, if a terrorism event requires officers to fly
in from another province to assist, their hands would be tied because
they'd lack the legal authority to act outside their turf. "In today's
world, we need to be able to do that," Boyd said.

Zaccardelli spoke of an "overarching need for us to have some national
policy with respect to how we can do policing in a blended way across
the country."

The federal Department of Public Safety should be more active as a
co-ordinator, the trio said, praising the American FEMA (Federal
Emergency Management Agency) model.

"When we expect that leadership to be there, it is not there in the
same way to help and support us to accomplish what the Canadian public
knows we need to look after," Boyd said.

At present, he noted, Canada lacks an inventory either of skills or of
equipment and resources that would be required to respond to a
terrorist incident or weather-related national emergency.

The policing reps said thousands more police officers are also needed
to safeguard the Canada-U.S. border. Currently, 145 Mounties oversee
the border.

"When you look at the potential threat we face," Zaccardelli said, "it
is simply not enough and we have to get serious about that."