The Belleville Police Services Board has approved the hiring of two officers and a civilian IT specialist to help address what the chief says are shortages on the force.
Chief Ron Gignac asked the board for approval for the new hires at a meeting last week. Gignac says Belleville is well behind provincial averages when it comes to the number of uniformed officers.
“When I did the review of our staffing, we now that we had 80 sworn police officers here from 1990 to 1994, well our sworn compliment is just 88 now,” explained Gignac.
On average a community, the size of Belleville, which sits at just under 50,000 people, should have a complement of 96 sworn officers.
“We have good growth and good population and residential units and industrial units and you know we need to keep up the standards,” said the mayor and chair of the board, Taso Christopher.
The board approved the hiring of two new officers and a civilian IT specialist.
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One of the new officers will join the traffic unit and the other hire would allow for the creation of a new detective in the Criminal Investigations Branch which has seen significant growth in cybercrimes over the last two decades.
“We want to be able to get to things as a priority, we want to be able to answer calls for service, we want to be able to get right on any investigation,” said Gignac.
The chief also asked for approval to hire two more officers but discussion of that has been put over until next spring during budget deliberations.
Those positions would be temporary officers used to fill vacancies left by officers who are on leave. Eventually, they would become full time as other officers retire.
“Sometimes if dollars and cents come ahead of investing into the community that causes you a bit of a challenge,” Christopher said.
Belleville police responded to nearly 58,000 calls last year. That statistic doesn’t include the thousands of traffic stops, according to Gignac.
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