FINDING FUNDS TO STAY TOUGH ON CRIME

Police Chief Julian Fantino opened the defence of his $691-million budget
request with a spirited barrage of statistical propaganda, citing
everything from the marijuana-growing growth industry to the current number
of file boxes required to complete a homicide investigation.

He trotted out such traditional bugbears as gun crime and the
"revolving-door justice system" while offering new revelations about his
officers' increasing volunteer activities and United Way contributions, all
in a multi-coloured blaze of ominously mounting bar graphs and dangerously
explosive pie charts.

But he needn't have bothered. As police board vice-chair Pam McConnell
noted in a somewhat acidic introduction to the chief's presentation, little
can be done to control policing costs in Toronto. Most of the overrun in
the requested budget, which is $47-million higher than what budget chief
David Soknacki wants to pay, is the unavoidable result of the officers'
latest lucrative labour contract. Labour costs account for 92 per cent of
the operating budget, she noted, which means that the city budget committee
will have to find its $47-million savings from the $55-million that's left.
Short of cancelling every police program apart from the payroll, it's not
possible.

The other problem, which is almost too obvious to mention, is that people
want the services police provide. There is not a single elected politician
in Toronto, at any level of government, who would dare to recommend a
reduction in the service's current 5,260-person cohort of uniformed police
officers -- or that it go soft on gun crime or child porn, not to mention
the poisoning of yuppie dogs.

So yesterday's budget meeting, which many less-than-realistic reformers
anticipated as a daring raid on an overstuffed treasury, scuttled quickly
off to the margins, focusing on relatively picayune issues of "gapping,"
overtime, court costs and whatnot -- all the stones bled dry in years past,
to little avail.

Could a hardheaded cost-cutter excise several million dollars in
unnecessary expenditure from the police budget? Of course he could. The
same is true of every other large government bureaucracy in this country.
It just never happens.

Chief Fantino said "all possible efficiencies" have already been achieved.
So there. End of story.

But fond delusions live on. "We're not here to cut badly needed services,"
Mr. Soknacki said at the end of yesterday's meeting. "We are here to find
efficiencies, savings and ways to do a better job."

Realistically, the budget maker's only solid option is to cut services --
or, at minimum, to control the rate at which existing services expand.
Recent police initiatives to control child porn and other sex crimes, which
were subsidized by provincial grants now due to expire, are clearly
vulnerable this year.

The sharply rising cost of controlling Internet-based child porn was one of
the prime budget pressures Chief Fantino cited in his presentation. The
hard question now is how far Toronto taxpayers can afford to go in pursuing
technologically savvy pedophiles.

The chief's presentation also highlighted the increasing financial
challenge of controlling marijuana cultivation, raising another obvious but
fruitless question: Why bother? Until they license it, however, pot will be
a source of increasing costs, not revenue.

But the grow-op problem does suggest one cost-recovery measure that could
be more palatable. Canadian law gives the state broad rights to seize the
proceeds of crime, but local police forces rarely if ever use them in
connection with low-level grow ops. If they did choose to seize assets
connected to grow-ops, one private-sector investigator familiar with the
legislation said, "they would get a pretty good return for their efforts."

"Canada is light years behind the Americans in this stuff," criminal lawyer
Paul Copeland added, "and that is probably good news."

But with taxpayers unwilling to pay cash up front for the police services
they demand, more of that stuff looks like the future to me.