Police Funding in Edmonton (May 2022)
On Wednesday, May 18th, Executive Committee was discussing the police funding formula. I currently sit on the Executive Committee and was able to vote on a recommendation that will be debated by council this week. The motion provides a base budget for policing as well as the approach to request additional funding. I did not support the motion and I’ll spend some time covering both points of the motion below.
The main reason I could not support the motion was due to the change in approach for determining the budget for Edmonton Police Service (EPS). The motion asked for a return to the old way of doing things which means that any funding requests would follow the same process as the rest of the departments within the City of Edmonton instead of the current method of a funding formula that takes into account a variety of factors including inflation, population growth, and an efficiency factor.
Now you might ask, why should EPS have a different process than the rest of the departments within the City of Edmonton? How is that fair?
In order to answer that properly it’s important to explain how EPS is different from other City departments. Unlike other City departments, City Council does not have the ability to direct how EPS spends their budget. The primary role of oversight is provided by the Edmonton Police Commission, not City Council. For all the details about how oversight works, you can review the Police Act which is created by the provincial government.
Since we don’t have the same ability to provide oversight like we do with other City departments, the process of asking for specific service packages doesn’t have the same value. A service package is a proposal for a specific service or program. A good example of that was back in 2014 when City Council received a service package for additional beat officers to patrol the downtown core. While we did originally see an increase in beat officers for downtown, over time, those beat officers were redeployed to other areas.
Now there’s nothing wrong with reallocating resources. That happens within the City of Edmonton all the time but usually if there is a significant shift proposed, City Council will be required to sign off on that kind of change. We don’t have that ability to approve a reallocation of funds within EPS.
It’s because of that reality that I generally prefer the current approach which is a funding formula. Since there is no guarantee that the funding approved goes to what is being asked for, I think it’s more appropriate to depoliticize the process for what is always a very sensitive topic. Our focus should be on monitoring results on the money being spent.
One of the other criticisms of the police funding formula is that it didn’t take into account challenging economic conditions. For example, as the pandemic started, we asked every department in the City of Edmonton, including those areas that deal with community safety, to find ways to keep costs down as we were entering an unknown situation. We took that once step further going into the 2021 budget deliberations and asked every other department, except police, to freeze or reduce their budgets. Over $50 million was cut from the City budget to achieve no tax increase for the first time in 24 years.
Should EPS have been held to the same standard as other City departments, including spots like Edmonton Fire Rescue? Maybe. But because we had a formula, there wasn’t the same conversation with our police budget as there was in all other areas.
While that is a fair criticism, I think that instead of scrapping the formula approach, we should simply adjust how the formula works. We could do that in a number of ways. We could apply a higher efficiency factor when times are tough. We could change the police funding formula to a broader community safety funding formula and add other areas that focus on proactive solutions to help improve community safety and well-being and are regularly scrambling to find consistent funding (ex: REACH Edmonton, EPL, etc.). That is what I want to see going forward as I think it would provide us with the most comprehensive solution.
When it comes to the actual amount of funding, it’s important to be very clear that the proposed motion would not result in a cut to police funding. The 2022 budget for EPS was $384.8 million and the motion suggests that the base level of funding should be $385 million. This clearly shows that there would be no cut to the base funding currently received by EPS.
Some headlines suggested that City Council was considering a $22 million cut which is not accurate based on the information above. Where that might have come from is that there is a separate report coming forward in June related to photo radar. This report outlines that fortunately, the number of people speeding is dropping and that means we are getting less revenue from photo radar. How this connects to EPS is that for quite some time, EPS has received $22 million per year from photo radar revenue. If this were to stop, and council did not subsequently add that to the tax base, then there could be a cut. But to be clear, no one has suggested that at all so the idea that council is considering a cut to EPS’ funding is not accurate.
When it comes to overall funding, it’s also worth providing a bit of historical information as well because I continue to get feedback from people expressing concerns about the reduced budget for EPS. First, from what I can find, EPS has not had a budget decrease in decades. In my time on council, EPS has received a funding increase every single year, that includes last year when council approved no tax increase for the first time in 24 years. In order to achieve that, we had to cut about $50 million from the budget but that allowed us to not have a tax increase while still increasing the budget for EPS.
If we look back a decade, EPS’ approved budget in 2012 was $264.5 million. For 2022, their budget including the $22 million from photo radar is $407 million. Over the last 10 years, their budget has increased by over $140 million. To put that in perspective, there is no other department that has experienced anywhere close to that percentage increase over the same period.
It’s because of this that I also think we sometimes become too focused on the budget and not enough on how it’s being used. Over the course of the last 10 years, the crime rate has gone up some years and it has gone down in other years. This includes a 12% reduction in crime in 2021 which was a larger reduction than the national average of 8%.
More money doesn’t immediately mean better results. That’s the case for policing and every department within the City of Edmonton. While I have voted to increase the funding for EPS every year since I’ve been on council, I will admit that there are times where I think we might have increased the budget more than needed based on the information provided during our budget deliberations.
I have found that over the years, police is the one budget item where it can be hard to ask tough questions. In one of my first budgets on council, I remember asking quite a few questions about the request for a new helicopter. I wanted to get some clear metrics about how it has helped in order to inform any decision to support a new helicopter. The questions I asked were no different than the type of questions I ask about any other City department but I received a lot of feedback from people who were very angry that I would even ask EPS questions about the need for that helicopter.
It was an odd place to be because I campaigned on good fiscal governance and I felt it was my responsibility to ask tough questions, no matter who is asking for money. That experience wasn’t the only time this has happened in my time on council. In fact, it happens almost every year. I don’t believe any department should be above scrutiny and considering the growth in the overall budget and people’s desire to have low or no tax increases, I think you should expect that we ask tough questions of every department.
If the motion that we debated last week had been split into 2 parts, one part related to the base budget and one part related to the use of the formula, I would have been willing to support the budget part since that means the starting point going into full budget deliberations for 2023 would be the 2022 approved budget. This is exactly how it works every year so in a way, that part of the motion would be redundant.
But I still cannot support the change to the formula based approach because I don’t believe it is a good use of council time to debate service packages that we can’t hold people accountable to and I think it will end up causing us to miss an opportunity to provide more consistent and stable funding for all organizations that focus on community safety and well-being, including our police service.
I recognize that there are real safety concerns for residents and those who work in our downtown. Those concerns cannot be ignored. I also recognize that there are some people who are in our downtown and beyond who are struggling with their mental health and/or addictions. Those concerns cannot be ignored either.
Some of these challenges are very complex and fall within the jurisdiction of the provincial government (ex: housing, mental health and addictions support, proper shelter standards, etc.). Those haven’t been adequately addressed for decades across many different provincial governments. Until some of those are addressed, we have to do what is within our control to help. Those solutions are often far more expensive and don’t actually solve the problem but instead will move it around from location to location.
A perfect example of this is from a recent visit I had to Bissell Centre. They are doing amazing work to try and provide daytime support to those experiencing houselessness. But just outside their building were a number of encampments. Every week, Edmonton Police remove the encampments and within hours of doing that, the tents are back up. This is a clear example of not having the right options to provide help.
It’s a terrible use of time for our police officers and peace officers because they spend hours ensuring the tents are taken down only to have those same individuals set up in the same locations. It’s a terrible solution for those experiencing houselessness because instead of getting the care and support in the appropriate housing or shelter, they are still living in a tent on an empty lot or in a park space. It’s a terrible situation for many of the local communities where encampments are set up because local residents aren’t trained to provide the right support and there are times where there can be safety issues from some of the encampments (ex: fires that require Edmonton Fire Rescue response).
I could spend days writing about the challenges we face but I’ve written about this before and discussed it in numerous Community Conversations. This was meant to be one example of how the conversation about policing is complicated because there are external factors that aren’t providing us with the outcomes we all seek. Using that example above, simply putting more money into policing does not fix that very challenging problem. All it would do is result in more regular displacement of those who need housing, mental health and addictions support, etc. while not providing any new support to all the communities where encampments have formed.
While there are some major challenges, there has also been some great progress made in other areas. EPS Chief Dale McFee has talked about how continuing to do the same things for the next 20 years as we have for the last 20 years is not effective. I think one of the reasons we saw such a decrease in crime in 2021 was due to the work of groups like the HELP team (Human-centred Engagement and Liaison Partnership Unit). This is a much better example of having the right people responding to each specific situation.
I don’t believe in the narrative that you are either 100% supportive of police or you hate them. I think most people realize that there will always be a need for police even if some of these more complex issues start getting addressed properly. I think that most people don’t want us to provide a blank cheque to any department, including the police, and expect that City Council will ask tough questions about how tax dollars are being spent. I think that most people understand there are real concerns from some communities about their relationship and treatment by police and government. Those aren’t mutually exclusive and I think the sooner we realize that the vast majority of people actually feel the same way, the easier it will be to navigate these complex issues.
