If crime is going down, why is the Squamish RCMP asking for more members? That was the question presenters from Simon Fraser University’s Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies attempted to answer at council’s committee of the whole meeting Tuesday.
“The official crime rate is down a lot over the last 20 years and the cost of an individual constable or running a detachment… is up, but is it up out of context with everything else? The short answer is: It isn’t,” said SFU criminology professor Paul Brantingham.
The presentation by Brantingham and Richard Bent, senior research fellow at the university, comes as council is working out final details on this year’s municipal budget.
The Squamish RCMP has submitted staffing recommendations that amount to roughly adding an officer a year through to 2020 in keeping with projected population increases.
Crime in the district has gone down drastically by some measures. Incidents of crime went down by 60 per cent from a peak in 2002 to 2014, according to Standard Crime Rate measures. Since 1998, crime has decreased by 37 per cent. But that metric does not adequately represent the work RCMP officers in Squamish had to do as a result of each crime, Brantingham said. A better measure is crime gravity, he said.
“[Crime gravity] gives you the average seriousness of the crimes that had to be dealt with by the police,” said Brantingham.
By that measure, crime has only gone down five per cent in the district since 1998.
The professors provided a snapshot of the crimes committed in Squamish in 2014 as part of their presentation. The 2015 statistics are not yet available.
Property crime made up the largest proportion of crimes in the district in 2014 at 45 per cent. Other criminal code offences such as disturbing the peace made up 22 per cent, violent crime accounted for 17 per cent and drug violations were 10 per cent of crimes to which local RCMP responded.
Rising policing costs can be attributed to the increased complexity of police work over the years, increased training and equipment and the legal and professional requirements, according to Brantingham.
The costs of salaries and benefits are also increasing in all sectors, he said.
The share of the municipal budget used to pay for the police has stayed relatively stable since 1983, when policing costs made up 15 per cent of Squamish’s municipal operating expenses, compared with 2014, when it accounted for 12 per cent. Provincially, policing accounted for 14 per cent of all B.C. municipalities’ operating expenses in 2013, according to data from institute.
Ultimately, more officers means less crime, according to Brantingham.
While crime is down, the number of calls when officers have to be dispatched are not.
Looking at 28 RCMP detachments in B.C. from 2009 to 2012, the professors found there are about three calls where an officer is dispatched to deal with something that is not criminal code for every one crime that will end up in a courtroom.
Criminal offences are considered in the standard crime statistics, but other calls are not, Brantingham explained.
“So if you take the crimes that you see in the crime statistics and quadruple that, you get a rough idea of how much work police are doing that is not reflected in the crime statistics,” he said. “And that is important in thinking about the service you are getting from the police.”
According to Brantingham, police costs aren’t out of proportion to other public service sectors. “For a lot of things that involve human interaction, you can’t work any faster and do the work properly,” he said. “The literature says each police officer you add gives you a measurable cut in the overall crime rate.”
