P.A. Police Chief Patrick Nogier was glad that council endorsed his budget request of an extra $1.2 million. (Susan McNeil/paNOW)

By Susan McNeil

Budget 2025

P.A. council passes $1.2 million increase to police budget

Jan 10, 2025 | 5:00 PM

Prince Albert Police Chief Patrick Nogier welcomed city council’s approval of his request for an increase of 6.6 per cent to the police budget for 2025, saying it will help the department modernize.

The extra $1.2 million lets the police force meet its contractual obligations to newly re-negotiated wages for officers and creates three new positions; a sworn community safety officer and two civilian tactical analyst positions.

“I’m very pleased to see that council actually listened and became engaged on exactly what some of the pressure points that we’re facing as an organization, knowing full well that these investments are made for the community,” Nogier said.

Council is close to wrapping up its 2025 budget discussions and has set a target of Feb. 3 to pass the final budget. They must then wait until April before the province determines the education mil rate will be before people get their bills. That usually happens May with due dates in June.

Property owners will also see changed valuations as 2025 is an assessment year.

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Having the analyst positions means the police can learn more about crime trends and patterns in the city.

“The evidence comes in the form of a statistical analysis that provides us with a really good indication of what’s going on in the community – time and location – and more importantly, doing a deeper dive into who are the individuals that are responsible for criminal activity in our community,” Nogier explained.

Having a better picture of who is committing the crimes gives a direction to turn to when it comes to trying to prevent it.

“Once we start drawing connections and parallels, we can then work with external partners to maybe address things that are quasi-criminal in nature, but contributing to the profile, or look at new ways of approaching those situations so that we can have different outcomes,” he said.

During his presentation, Nogier said that an ongoing concern is how police cells are being used for holding remand prisoners, which is not their purpose.

They have been approached by the Saskatchewan Marshal’s Service to hold the people they will be arresting once they are operational and, when asked, Nogier said that the city needs a remand facility.

The increased need for places to hold prisoners along with another growing need to have a new headquarters means that the city needs to start thinking ahead about a new police headquarters as well.

This year, the Police Commission discussed and removed $5,000,000 in the police budget for new headquarters before it was presented to council, but Nogier warned that it will need to happen at some point.

“If you’re going to have a talk and discussion about any additions to our organization through a provincial funding scheme [the 17 officers that were announced in September 2024] that unfortunately and inevitably is going to lead to a discussion about where can we put these officers,” Nogier said.

He is open to talks about how that can happen, possibly through sharing space with other organizations with similar mandates.

The compensation Prince Albert spends on sworn officers is lower than other cities. In Saskatoon, an arbiter awarded their officers an increase that puts the cost per officer at $118,950/per year but in Prince Albert, the same officer would cost just over $109,000.

That makes it difficult to keep experienced officers and attract new ones.

Some time was spent talking about how technology will change policing. RCMP across Canada will be rolling out body worn cameras this year, with 90 per cent of officers expecting to be equipped by mid-November.

That is something P.A. Police will also need to consider along with what role artificial intelligence can play.

Nogier estimated that for every 15 minutes an officer spends ‘on the street’, they spend another 45 minutes on a computer.

If an AI could record the interaction with witnesses, suspects or the public and convert the audio to a transcript and start formatting the report, the officer could spend significantly more time with actual policing.

However, that also needs to approach with caution, he said, as often tech companies sell their product as being more capable than it is.

Right now, city police can access drones from forces like the RCMP if they need to, but having their own is also something to explore.

A drone can respond to a situation and provide camera footage of an incident much faster than an officer in a vehicle and does not put the travelling public in any danger.

The technology needs to make the force more efficient and effective and Nogier said that they will look at how other forces – including those south of the US border have made out with theirs.

More immediately, the 2025 budget will allow the police to save for ballistic vest replacement, firearms range management, a one time purchase of a canine and replacing in car cameras, other computer related items and a wet processing bench and vehicle replacement.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com

On BlueSky: @susanmcneil.bsky.social