St. Albert city council members are mulling over if they should scrap the city’s current decade-old policing plan and create a new one, or make changes to the current plan in place.
The conversation to revamp the city’s policing policy came after the July 4 council meeting, which saw council members enshrine the amount oof RCMP officers and municipal enforcement, or bylaw, officers required in the city.
The staffing targets were originally identified in 2014 when the current long-term plan was developed, and suggest the city should aim to have one uniformed RCMP officer for every 1,000 residents, and one bylaw officer for every 5,000 residents. On July 4 the city enshrined the suggested ratio into policy.
During the July 4 council meeting Coun. Natalie Joly, one of two dissenting votes against the policy change, said she felt amending the policy based on analysis and work done 10 years prior wasn't best practice.
“I feel like updating the policy before considering the strategy is doing things backwards,” she said during debate.
Instead of going off the old data, Joly read a motion, which if passed later this summer, will have city staff create a business case for a new long-term policing plan and include it in the draft 2024 budget for council's consideration.
“I think we all realize a 10-year-old plan, especially concerning policing, it's time to look at replacing it,” Joly said.
During the July 4 Chief Administrative Officer Bill Fletcher said the city believes revamping the policing plan is “an important endeavour.”
“Our recommendation would be over the next — I'm hesitant to put a timeline in gospel in front of you — but certainly over the next year at a minimum would be to look at that plan and we'd probably have to reprioritize, (but) it's probably a two- or three-year project,” Fletcher said.
The 2014 long-term plan, just the second in the city's history, sought to make “community policing” more of a priority, rather than focusing solely on general duty.
The report says community policing is best thought of as officer involvement in more day-to-day activities in a municipality, such as school resource officers, bike and golf cart patrols through urban trail networks, and attendance at events like the Farmers' Market.
Despite community policing being identified as more of a priority in the 2014 long-term plan, the only measurable targets the plan sought to create were the staffing rates that were just adopted into policy last week. While the plan mentions crime-reduction efforts and case-clearance rates, for example, it didn't set any measurable targets for either outcome.
Joly said she thinks a new long-term plan would be more ambitious in its goals.
“I think that's the direction policing is going in, looking at social outcomes,” Joly said. “I suspect that the experts that (may) come in and redo the plan (would) definitely be looking at the social outcomes as an important factor in how we approach policing and those wraparound services related to policing in St. Albert.”
Everett Cooke, the city's fire chief and director of emergency services, told council he thinks it would be “prudent” for the city to consider a new long-term plan now, given ongoing “discussions around a provincial police force (and) the upcoming contract with the RCMP.”
Joly said she thought having a new long-term plan wouldn't be affected by the ongoing uncertainty around municipal policing in Alberta, and nationwide, because regardless of which police force operates in St. Albert, the city will still have desired outcomes that any police force would be responsible for.
“There's lots involved in (policing) that will apply regardless of who is providing the service,” she said.
“Who is providing the service is certainly up in the air and municipalities are going to have very little control over what that looks like, but regardless of who is providing the service, we'll still be involved in wanting particular outcomes in terms of how we invest in (policing).”
While no cost estimate for a new long-term plan has been determined, Heron said she feels St. Albert's consistently low crime rates and strong perception of safety could mean updating the current long-term plan might be more cost-effective than creating a new one.
“Ten years is a long time to go without looking at a long-term plan, but it maybe doesn't need to be a complete rewrite, it might (just need to) be tweaked,” Heron said.
“Honestly, St. Albert's such a safe community, so I don't know if we really want to go into spending a ton of money on that plan.”
