Pubdate: Tue, 21 Apr 2009
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2009 The Vancouver Sun
Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Colin Kenny
Note: Colin Kenny is chair of the Senate committee on national 
security and defence.

IN TIMES OF RECESSION, THE COUNTRY NEEDS MORE POLICE

Drug addictions breed thievery. Gangs breed thievery. Recessions 
breed thievery. And right now Canada --like most industrialized 
countries -- is having significant problems with all three of these: 
drug addiction, gangs and one whopper of a crime-breeding recession.

Statistics will tell you that crime rates have been down in recent 
years. But yesterday's statistics won't tell you what is happening 
today. Nor do statistics reflect crimes that go unreported because 
victims know that the police are stretched too thin to deal with them.

So Canadians should get ready for more break-ins and robbery of all 
kinds. They should also expect more of the kind of violence that 
often goes with this stuff. Convenience stores in all kinds of 
Canadian communities are already getting whacked.

What can governments do about it? Well, I believe in social workers 
as much as the next Liberal, but more police also have to be part of 
the solution, especially when the police are doing a lot of the 
social work in Canadian communities right now.

The bad cops who fire Tasers at the wrong time and drop drunks off at 
the outskirts of town grab the headlines, but a lot of good cops have 
been saving the lives of a lot of street people in recent years.

We need more police on the streets, but we also need more police at 
our airports and seaports, at our border crossings and on the Great 
Lakes. These are all vulnerable areas that American and Canadian 
security officials are worried about.

I said we need more cops. I didn't say we need more prisons. The 
federal government likes to bellow macho manifestos about getting 
tougher on sentencing, but prisons create more crime than they 
prevent. If the American experience tells us anything, it is that 
prisons are a cop-out when it comes to preventing crime.

Let's focus instead on better policing. And let's start with the 
RCMP. The modest investments the federal government has talked about 
making in better policing have all but ignored the RCMP, but the 
Senate committee on national security and defence estimates that our 
county needs somewhere between 5,300 and 6,500 additional Mounties to 
supplement the 17,000-plus officers now in uniform.

These officers would make the lives of Canadians more secure in small 
towns and big cities alike. They would help strengthen our economic 
relationship with the United States to help pull us out of the 
recession because they would make our borders more secure, and help 
jump-start the process of unclogging crossings between the two countries.

If you think we've got more than enough Mounties to go around, 
consider a few facts that may make your head swim:

- - While the U.S. Coast Guard patrols the Great Lakes with 2,200 
officers, the best Canada has been able to offer up are 14 Mounties. 
The Americans keep asking us to team up with them to fight crime on 
the border, but the RCMP just doesn't have the funding to provide 
personnel to join them.

- - Canada's ports are riddled with crime, but the Mounties don't have 
the officers to do much about it. Huge gaps in security leave our 
ports vulnerable to both criminals and terrorists. We need 900 more 
Mounties to police our ports properly.

- - The committee heard testimony that the Mounties can only keep tabs 
on one-third of the criminal organizations in Canada that it knows 
exist, let alone all the others it hasn't found yet.

- - A 2002 study showed that Canada ranked 19th out of 23 OECD 
countries in police officers per capita -- our number of police per 
capita was 186 per 100,000 people. Australia, a comparable society, 
came in at 305 officers per 100,000 people.

- - Statistics Canada data for 2008 showed that Canada has climbed all 
the way up to 196 officers per 100,000 people. Wow! Unfortunately, we 
have a much larger increase in problems with drugs, gangs, terrorism 
and the recession.

- - Police work has become increasingly time-consuming for a variety of 
reasons. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is essential to modern 
Canadian society, but the time it takes for police to comply with its 
strictures means it takes three officers to do the work that two used 
to do. A break-and-enter case that took an hour to investigate in 
1970 is now likely to take between five and 10 hours.

Luckily, Canadians need more police at a time when Canadians are in 
desperate need of good jobs.

Being a police officer is a very good job, even if the government is 
squeezing the RCMP on salaries, just like it is squeezing the rest of 
the public service. Squeezing police salaries is not a smart idea 
when we need the very best kind of people to get into the RCMP and 
help revive the organization's proud traditions.

I say stop pontificating about tougher prison sentences. Give us more 
quality humans to fight the good fight for a humane society.

Colin Kenny is chair of the Senate committee on national security and defence.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart