Eyes in the sky, at what cost?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2015 (3799 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Guilty with an explanation to come, your honour. That was about as much as the Winnipeg Police Service was saying after the police helicopter got all potty-mouthed over the downtown skies Monday. The police spokesman couldn’t get out of that Tuesday morning news conference fast enough.

According to the Twitterverse, though, the air turned a certain shade of blue over the city’s centre at about 10 p.m., as the flight crew, unaware the public address system was full-go, bantered on about sex acts and money. No word yet whether the two were related.

Officially, the department said only that the police executive was still gathering the details on what happened from the three personnel involved. Yes, there might be disciplinary measures. And, we’re sorry. Ahem. Again, we apologize.

Sorry, indeed. This disturbance comes after the department managed to reduce, to just four in 2013, the complaints it got from residents about the noise the helicopter made in its flights.

Clearly, the crew had time to kill. There were no reports Tuesday of the helicopter, purchased in 2010 and put into service the following year, being key to any arrests through the night.

Statistics from 2011 to 2013 show that between scheduled maintenance, staff shortages and unanticipated downtime due to bad weather or repairs — the big black bird is on at least its third engine — the helicopter has responded to a total of 7,361 incidents and has been key to 512 arrests. The offences varied, but calls on domestic disturbances and suspicious persons top the list.

That sounds impressive, but for the fact that in 2013 alone, the WPS responded to more than 185,000 calls for service, with more than 15,000 persons charged.

In other words, the helicopter’s contribution is marginal.

The police service has not yet posted the annual report for 2014. But to date, the helicopter bought for more than $3 million cost more than $4 million to stay in the air in its first three years. Operating costs were billed to the province.

So, while Winnipeg’s all a-twitter about the chit-chat of idle officers, the real conversation, the more pointed question for the Winnipeg Police Board, should be whether this is a justified expense or a costly extravagance for a cash-strapped city and a provincial government mired in deficits.

There will always be the call where a pair of eyes in the sky, equipped with infrared and lights that can illuminate a crime scene, will make the difference. That, however, cannot be the core argument to hiring a helicopter for police duty.

The $7 million spent since 2010 would buy a lot of boots on the ground. It could also help buy the police department the kind of expert analysts for hard-to-crack cases and lengthy investigations. Or, it could just as easily be spent by the city and the province on other services that are desperate for cash.

The helicopter is approaching the 1,000 hours per year of flight time the city committed to, in order to make good on a deal with the province for the money that government transfers for operational expenses. And at that, the flight hours are just half what it was expected to fly.

The police force, in its 2013 flight operations annual report, says there were 200 arrests that year that could not have happened without the helicopter. But at $1.5 million in operational expenses the same year, the average cost per arrest was $7,600.

That’s a crude measure of the value of one arm of law enforcement. But it is somewhere for the police board to start in a review of this particular police tool.