Hub Staff
Saugeen Shores is by no means the only municipality in Ontario dealing with the question of whether to maintain their own police force or contract policing with the OPP.
Brockville and Midland are just two of the communities that have been having similar discussions.
News outlets in both communities have been covering the various issues involved and included have been some recent articles that favour the local policing option.
Here is some information from the publication, Our Midland, some of which includes reporting by the Brockville Recorder and Times.
The Hub was alerted to these pieces by members of the community as well as members the Saugeen Shores Police Service.
Although the piece in Our Midland is written in the first person, there is no indication of the author’s identity.
Edited excerpts follow:
Many municipalities asked for what used to be called a “standalone” police contract where the OPP effectively replaced the existing police service and guaranteed officers to remain in the contracted jurisdiction and service the community first and foremost.
That would be at an increased cost over the “integrated model” where a community would simply be covered by existing detachments and reduced to the status of a “zone” that gets no more – and hopefully no less – policing than the other “zones” that the local detachment serves.
The new costing formula for OPP service is no longer based on just households but also businesses and commercial operations.
In addition, the standalone policing option has been taken off the table and the only option now is the integrated model.
One benefit of a local police service are response times which in Midland’s case currently is 3-5 minutes for a call “in progress.”
With an integrated model from the OPP, the closest available officer could be some distance away. OPP response times are not available.
The Midland article concludes with this recap of the issues of concern to many who want to keep a local police service.
• We lose our local dedicated police service that we’ve had for more than a century.
• We lose a wide variety of dedicated services that we have grown accustomed to and expect as part of our safe community.
• We lose millions in buyouts and top up costs for employees not taken on by the OPP and to bring benefits such as pensions for retained employees up to the OPP level.
• We pay for retrofits or build a whole new detachment on town land somewhere if current facilities are found to be not suitable to the OPP.
• We lose autonomy of a police services board that can actually direct the strategic policing goals, hire and negotiate the chief’s salary as well as negotiate the salaries of the whole police service (uniform and civilians alike).
• We lose full-time dedicated community police officers.
• We get our share of policing spread around with neighbouring municipalities
• We don’t get any new services that we don’t already have for free (paid for by our provincial taxes) such as helicopters, bomb squads, marine units, police dogs, SWAT teams etc.
• We sign an initial three-year deal without any assurances of what year four and beyond will look like
• We become a “zone” with no more (hopefully no less) policing than that enjoyed by others in the region.
In Brockville, the Recorder and Times reported that OPP officials assured there would always be front-line officers within the city limits.
Mayor David Henderson first started the process of requesting the OPP costing in October 2012. The OPP imposed a moratorium on costings in the fall of 2013, as the provincial force reviewed its system for billing municipalities. The province lifted that moratorium last November.
Brockville is currently one of four municipalities in the “first group” to see their costings resumed, said Sgt. Gilbert Cadieux, of the municipal policing bureau.
The others are Deep River, Orangeville and Midland.
