Ottawa police board approves hiring 10 officers to combat gun, gang violence

The Ottawa police board approved a motion to hire 10 more officers to combat a rise in gun and gang activity in the city at their meeting Monday afternoon.

According to Coun. Eli El-Chantiry, who chairs the police board, the new officers will be paid for through an advance on next year’s budget, which will be supplemented by promised federal funding to combat gun and gang activity in major cities across the country. The promised funding is $327.6 million over five years and $100 million annually after the first five years.

El-Chantiry along with Mayor Jim Watson recently released a memo outlining their plan to pay for the officers should the motion be approved at council.

According to Steve Bell, deputy chief of police, five of the 10 newly-hired officers will be going to the Investigative Unit and the other five will be going to DART, the Direct Action Response Team.

The officers hired will be direct-entry officers, not recruits according to El-Chantiry. This ensures that the officers can begin work as soon as possible instead of going through the recruitment process.

Coun. Diane Deans, whose ward has experienced a recent rise in violence, questioned whether a “brick and mortar” community police office would be a better benefit to the community than more uniformed police. Bell said that although that is one way to prevent crime, a more proactive route is needed to prevent violent crime in the area.

“Its been our approach that bricks and mortar are not the solution to dealing with community issues,” said Bell. “It’s more around the people. I’d rather have community police officers out in the community building those relationships and working very hard.”

So far, the police have pledged to hire 75 officers during this term and plan to hire 90 more over the next three years. The motion from the police board meeting Monday is to be voted on at City Council on Wednesday.