(File photo/paNOW Staff)

By Alison Sandstrom

Police and priorities

Council votes down motion to consider cuts to police budget

Jul 14, 2020 | 8:17 AM

Prince Albert city council has flatly rejected a request from a citizen’s group that wanted to see at least $750,000 cut from the annual police budget.

The City committed $17.2 million to policing in 2020, around a quarter of the annual city budget.

In the letter to council, the group calling themselves “young citizens of Prince Albert” said money spent on policing would be more effectively invested in community-led health and safety initiatives, like increased mental health services, housing initiatives and harm-reduction. Referencing movements across North America against police violence, they asked council to divest at a minimum $750,000 (equivalent to an early projection of City’s operating shortfall due to the pandemic) from the police budget.

“What we need in Prince Albert is leadership that can initiate a reduction in police violence that targets our most marginalized people,” the letter said.

While Coun. Lennox-Zepp made a motion asking that the letter be considered during 2021 budget deliberations, most councillors dismissed the idea.

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Coun. Dennis Ogrodnick said most of the alternatives to policing suggested by the letter fell under the province’s jurisdiction, not the City’s.

“We [as a City] don’t have the financial capability of increasing funding for mental services,” he told council. “That is clearly the provincial government’s responsibility.”

Coun. Blake Edwards echoed Ogrodnick’s comments that they should push the federal and provincial governments to spend more on mental health and addiction services. But he said, if anything, most residents he’d spoken to wanted more police in the community, not less.

“We do have specific issues in Prince Albert that we need to deal with,” he said. “But we also need protection, and policing is the protection.”

Council voted 7-2 not to forward the letter to 2021 budget deliberations.

Coun. Dennis Nowoselsky, who has long been an advocate of reducing the Prince Albert Police Service budget, told paNOW just because council had voted to drop the issue for now, didn’t mean it wouldn’t be back in the future.

“The recommendation from the citizen’s group basically said that we should look at other resources to provide better crime prevention and should take some of the funds from the police budget to do that,” he said, speaking after the meeting. “I think we’ve got to be open-minded and explore that…it’s time to have some creative discussion in the community.”

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alison.sandstrom@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @alisandstrom