Sault Ste. Marie Police Service is looking to cash in on a proposed 4.59 per cent budget increase for 2023 — despite recent statistics suggesting that crime has been steadily trending downwards in the city over the course of the past year.
The most recent statistics provided by the law enforcement agency show decreases in homicides (50 per cent), robberies (51.9 per cent), break-and-enters (27.1 per cent), attempted break-and-enters (28.6 per cent) thefts (14.2 per cent) and thefts of motor vehicles (28.2 per cent) reported to police between January and November of 2022 when compared to the same 11-month period in 2021.
Sault Ste. Marie Police Service Chief Hugh Stevenson agrees that "general occurences" have been decreasing. However, he says it's the frequency and severity of violent crimes that have been going up over the past few years
“The number of violent offences are on the rise, and they have been for the last five years since I’ve been here,” the police chief told reporters following the open portion of the monthly Police Services Board meeting Thursday.
Stevenson added that his police service can “easily see an increase in very violent offences,” as murders, attempted murders and aggravated assaults have all been on the rise over the past “two or three years.”
The police chief also reported an 80 per cent increase in violent crime over the past five years while defending the proposed police budget hike during a city council budget meeting this past Monday.
Stevenson told reporters Thursday that homicide investigations in particular are eating up a number of police resources — he used officers guarding police scenes and being present at coroner investigations as a couple of examples of this — which end up being “very expensive.”
“The amount of resources that go into that are increasing all the time in terms of the information and evidence that we collect for the courts, so it’s all hands on deck in a homicide,” said Stevenson. “Remember, when a homicide occurs your other occurrences are still going on. Therefore, overtime becomes an issue.”
More than $324,000 in overtime at Sault Ste. Marie Police Service in 2022 was due to staff shortages — a sharp increase from the roughly $202,000 that was paid out the previous year, but somewhat in line with the pre-pandemic staff shortage-related overtime costs of more than $368,000 in 2019.
In all, nearly $1.2 million in both banked and paid overtime costs were accrued by the police service in 2022.
“What happens to an organization when you’re that busy is that it tends to spike the amount of time that people are simply too tired to come into work, they get burned out like all of us as humans and they need that time with their families to regenerate for their next shift,” Stevenson said with regards to overtime due to staff shortages in 2022. “You combine workload as well as staffing pressures, retirement and sickness and you end up with more overtime being called for people to come in and backfill those shifts.”
Stevenson says the hiring of four new officers this past September will “certainly reduce the amount of overtime” at the police service, but the impacts of those hirings won't be felt until the rookie officers receive training, a process that he anticipates will take about 18 months from beginning to end.
The police chief added that a total of 19 officers will be also leaving Sault Ste. Marie Police Service due to attrition within the next three years.
“We have to be prepared for that, and that’s what we do — and the [Police Services Board] has been very good historically to allow me to hire in advance so I can offset that attrition in 12 to 18 months,” Stevenson said.
Stevenson told city council Monday that 9.9 per cent of his officers are currently on leave and an additional 5.6 per cent are being accommodated for various reasons and can't respond to 911 calls.