In the first 9 months of the year, Kingston police spent a half-a-million dollars over budget.
“It has been really busy in the last 9 months as the crime statistics show,” City of Kingston director of finance, John Howes said.
Almost half of the overtime pay according to the report was spent tracking Queen’s University parties with a total of $211,000 dollars, not including the fake homecoming weekend last week, which took over 300 officers to monitor including support from OPP and Ottawa police.
“These weekends are very large police operations, they’ve got a lot of moving parts,” Inspector Brian Pete said. “So just meals and accommodations alone for visiting partners is quite expensive.”
On the St. Patrick’s day weekend, police spent $83,000 not included in the budget to supply officers to the university district. That’s compared to a mere $2,000 dollars spent for the same festivities in 2021.
A further $128,000 was spent monitoring the university district during the month of September. And the cost is only expected to increase.
“As we head into the last quarter of course we are going to be spending a fair bit on the Queen’s activity. I think last year we spent just shy of a million dollars so I think you will see that deficit grow during that last quarter,” Howes said.
But it’s not just Queen’s celebrations keeping Kingston police busy. $26,000 was spent supplying officers to the freedom convoy protest in Ottawa, which Kingston police says it expects to be reimbursed.
A further $37,000 was spent during the city’s own slow role protests last February. Meantime $87,000 was spent on overtime during 6 major incidents: 4 homicides and 2 incidents of a barricaded person.
And a large chunk, $102,000 Kingston police spent on one investigative project that is now complete.
The year is not over yet with Kingston police bracing for yet another weekend of partying for Queen’s homecoming this weekend.