New police chief faces myriad challenges

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This article was published 17/09/2024 (397 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Whoever becomes Winnipeg’s next police chief will have their work cut out for them.

The Winnipeg Police Board is expected to recommend a new police chief to city council by November to replace former chief Danny Smyth, who retired earlier this month.

The new chief will face several immediate challenges, not the least of which will be how to manage record volumes of calls for service with existing resources.

Art Stannard, the police service’s interim chief, said last Friday the police service is struggling to keep up with a growing number of calls. Police had a record backlog of 440 calls in the queue on Aug. 31, prompting the service to ask the public on social media for its patience due to “heavy call volumes.”

The challenge facing police is real. The service has fewer police officers than it did a decade ago (1,366 officers in 2023, down from 1,463 in 2013). Meanwhile, Winnipeg’s population has increased to 815,599 from 695,436 during that time.

That has left police with little choice but to rely increasingly on overtime, which is costly to taxpayers and takes a human toll on officers.

Stannard says the police service needs an additional 78 officers to respond to the growth in calls. Police board chairman Coun. Markus Chambers also said earlier this month that it’s time for city council to discuss increasing the police complement.

These will not be easy decisions to make, especially for a municipal government facing chronic deficits and a financial stabilization fund that could be drained by the end of 2024.

There is also pressure on city council to invest resources into other areas, such as fighting homelessness and poverty as a way of reducing crime, rather than hiring more police officers.

The new chief will also have to tackle the thorny issue of how to police a growing number of protests in the city. Police have responded to 415 protests this year, up from a record 299 last year.

The sheer volume of demonstrations and the fact some of them have been directed towards law enforcement have created unique challenges for police.

New crowd monitoring techniques have been employed, which sometimes includes police surveying protests from a distance. That has raised questions about crowd safety, such as during a Sept. 4 protest at Portage and Main when a motorist drove through a blockade and struck a cyclist.

Supt. Dave Dalal said police face challenges at protests when the demonstrations are directed at them, as they were at the Sept. 4 gathering. The protest was in response to the death of Tammy Bateman, an Indigenous woman who was struck by a police vehicle at the Fort Rouge Park riverside homeless encampment two days earlier.

“We always try to take an approach that tries to put the least amount of officers at harm, at risk and face-to-face with a crowd, specifically in (an) instance where we were the focus (of the protest),” Dalal said last week.

The new chief will also have to improve relations with Indigenous communities, which have been strained in recent years.

A rise in violent crime in the city and growing retail theft will also add to the challenges facing the new chief.

Care will have to be taken in how police resources are most effectively deployed to respond to those growing areas of crime.

The police board should choose a new chief who has a concrete vision of how to manage those issues, someone who can bring a fresh perspective to law enforcement in Winnipeg.

Whoever it is, it will be a critical appointment.