EDITORIAL: THE COST OF CRIME
Date: Mar 13, 2006 2:46 PM
PUBLICATION: The Edmonton Sun
DATE: 2006.03.13
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Editorial/Opinion
PAGE: 10
COLUMN: Editorial
WORD COUNT: 377

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THE COST OF CRIME

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After only a couple of months on the job, new police Chief Mike Boyd is
already building a reputation as a man who wants to confront problems in
the department head on rather than sweep them under the carpet.

He’s held a series of public town hall meetings in order to hear
directly from the public about their beefs with the police service. He’s
issued new guidelines about the usage of Tasers and the police
information computer.

And it was no different last week when Boyd admitted flat out that, when
it came to responding to the fatal bus beating of Stefan Conley, the EPS
blew it.

“We failed in the handling of this call,” declared the chief.

He’s not wrong. In an ideal world, the police would have been on the
scene within minutes of the initial call from the bus driver. Instead,
it took multiple calls and about 25 minutes for the cops to arrive, by
which time, some of the passengers on the bus who witnessed the fatal
beating had left the scene.

Sadly, though, a quicker police response would not have saved Conley’s
life. Paramedics were on the scene within minutes of the first call and
were unable to keep him alive.

But while Boyd made quick changes to police policies in an effort to
ensure that there will always be cars available to handle high priority
calls, we’re not sure if that’s going to be enough.

We have some sympathy for the claims of the police union that the cops
are understaffed. To be sure, everyone who works in the public sector -
from teachers to nurses to even city councillors these days – thinks
that they’re underfunded and have too few bodies.

The trick is to separate the Chicken Littles who insist the sky is
always falling from the legitimate concerns that the public good is
being jeopardized because not enough money is being spent on certain
services, like policing.

As Sun writer Doug Beazley pointed out on Saturday, Edmonton’s ratio of
cops to citizens is about one to 500. Ideally, given the growing violent
crime in this town, it should be about one to 400.

We’re a law-and-order paper. One thing we rarely, if ever, criticize
governments for is putting more police officers on the street. Ensuring
public safety is one of the most basic functions of government. And as
we mentioned in this space last week, we’d much rather see the city
spend money hiring more police officers than spend it on expanding city
council from 12 to 14 councillors.

Make no mistake, hiring more cops comes with a cost.

But there’s a much higher cost to be paid for a society degenerating
into lawlessness.

Which one would Edmontonians rather pay?