(CBC News) - Saskatchewan’s rural politicians say some of their communities are operating with a serious shortage of RCMP officers — and the RCMP agrees.
RCMP Insp. Bob Mills admits that there are too few RCMP members in rural detachments.
The recommended strength of RCMP in rural parts of the province is about 997 people, but there currently are only 727 on the job, Mills told CBC News on Thursday.
David Marit, the president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, told CBC on Friday that with police forces stretched thin, he’s worried about safety for both officers and the public.
Sometimes only two officers are available at a detachment to cover a large geographic region, he said.
Understaffed detachments was one of the issues raised in a major task force report on governance and cultural change in the RCMP, released last December.
‘Unacceptable vacancy rates’
The report looked at detachments across Canada and found “unacceptable vacancy rates” everywhere.
“Members and employees are expected to cover their own work, the work not done by others due to vacancies and the work required to fill ever-increasing administrative demands,” the report said.
The report, written by an advisory committee and submitted to the federal government on Dec. 14, said budget constraints have prevented the RCMP from recruiting and training new cadets to meet anticipated future needs.
Mills said the Saskatchewan detachments can hire only as many people as the provincial government will pay for.
“We’ve identified the fact that we need more officers to government and what the service delivery impacts are,” he said.
“The less people you have at any given location means you have less hours of actual active coverage.”
Marit said rural communities, which pay levies for RCMP services, are prepared to pay a fair portion of policing costs, but added that the provincial and federal governments need to chip in as well.
He said he hopes to see the issue addressed in upcoming budgets.
3 responses so far ↓
1 supportourforce // Feb 18, 2008 at 12:43
Our Federal Goverment really does not get it ! Will I need to start listing all the on duty deaths that occurred over the past 5 years ?
All these on duty death had one thing in common. Manpower shortage. In one of the most publicized case for example (Maythorpe), where 4 very young rcmp members lost their lives. Where was the supervisor, swat team, etc… Well, I’ll tell you. Because of the existing manpower shortage, the RCMP now has recruits training recruits. An extreme receipe for disaster. Just look at your local detachment and how young the new officer generation is. 10 Years ago, the average years of service at a given detachment was around 18 years. Now it is down to about 7 years. We are loosing all of our experienced officers to early retirement due to burn out. They are being replaced with young inexperienced and often unsuppervised officers. Ad to this the current officer shortage and the increasing demand for service and you get a very dangerous situation where our young officers are quickly becoming overtressed and are as a result responding to calls without proper analysis, training and supervision. Enought already. When will this nonesense stop ! Every time I turn around, another young cop dies because of this Federal bureaucratic negligence !
2 Justbecause // Feb 18, 2008 at 23:45
I agree with your comments , the RCMP is losing many experienced Officers because of Burnout and the Political atmosphere within the Force. We still have some upper managers trying to plan the next amalgamation of Detachments so we can create yet anothers Officers position. All the talk of the National back up policy is just that ,nothing has changed in the Big contract divisions. Yes if the people only knew I believe there would be outrage . Do our Brave young Men & Women deserve better , NO QUESTION
3 speaking_my_mind // Feb 19, 2008 at 09:11
Yeah, a toxic political atmosphere and burnout run hand in hand. It was never this bad years ago.
Doesn’t the concept of a centralized detachment run counter to this whole community policing concept? Does anybody really believe that satellite detachments would fulfill the same role in a given community? On top of having to create positions for more brass, they are going to need to have create more specialized community policing positions. More symbolism over substance.
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