City council has approved an appeal from the Calgary Police Service (CPS) for 50 additional officers.
The CPS had asked the city to approve an additional $7.5 million per year beginning in 2017 to allow for the new hires.
The request came just days after Calgary Police Chief Roger Chaffin suggested a spike in Calgary’s crime rate in 2015 was due to increased drug activity and the economic slump.
On Monday, councillors voted unanimously to approve the request.
The money will come from increased traffic ticket revenue. Alberta’s provincial government raised the level for fines on traffic offences in 2015.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi said CPS already has the money needed to pay for the extra officers.
“They have the money. They know that even if they write the same amount of tickets, they have more money than they had before,” Nenshi told reporters Monday at city hall.
“They said, ‘let’s deploy that to the front line’ and that’s the right thing to do.”
According to a report which went before city council on Monday, the CPS added only ten new positions in 2015 and none in 2016.
“The minimal addition of new positions, however, has meant that the number of citizens per police officer has risen from 600 in 2014 to 616 this year,” the report reads.
Had council not approved the new positions, the report suggested the population-to-police-officer ratio would increase to approximately 628, eroding the CPS’s ability to “maintain the current level of public safety.”
With the increase in officers, the report suggests the citizens-to-police ratio will fall slightly to about one officer for every 613 Calgarians.
WATCH: Calgary Police Chief Roger Chaffin responds to the Statistics Canada report of increased violence in the city in 2015
With files from Gary Bobrovitz
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