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In a setback for the Victoria Police Department, the B.C. government has upheld Victoria city council’s decision in 2019 to turn down Chief Del Manak’s request for additional staff.
The Victoria and Esquimalt Police Board had asked the provincial government’s police services branch to overrule council and authorize four new positions — a civilian research analyst, a cyber crimes investigator and two officers assigned to the integrated Assertive Community Treatment or ACT teams that help people with mental-health problems.
Esquimalt council supported two of the four positions during budget discussions in 2019, but Victoria council declined to pay for any of them.
Manak stated at the time that he felt the board had a strong case.
“The police board and the department feel strongly that those are required resources for our community to provide safety,” he said.
He pointed to an independent University of Victoria study that concluded the police officers on ACT teams contribute to more positive outcomes for people with mental-health challenges.
But Brenda Butterworth-Carr, director of police services, stated in a Jan. 17 letter to the police board that she was unclear what research had been done to “address the absence of evidence-based data.”
She also pointed to a new report recommending changes to the policing agreement between Esquimalt and Victoria that, she said, could free up additional resources and resolve some of the issues identified by the police board.
Victoria city council authorized release of the letter during a closed meeting Thursday.
Manak was not immediately available for comment Friday. But Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, speaking as co-chair of the police board, expressed disappointment with the decision. “The department’s going to need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how — with already very, very stretched resources — it’s going to be able to manage keeping those ACT officers, because I think those ACT officers are really important.
“So that means the chief is going to have to figure out – yet again – different deployment models.”
More broadly, if the province isn’t going to support the police board’s request for more mental-health officers, it will need to look at different ways of providing mental-health services to vulnerable people, she said.
“The police are already working really hard out there, and front-line mental-health workers are really working hard out there, and people providing support to vulnerable people in the parks are really working hard out there. And yet there are still people with mental-health and substance use issues who don’t have proper care
“So I think that this opens up kind of a wider conversation about how to provide that care.”
The police board won a previous appeal, when the acting director of police services ordered Victoria and Esquimalt to hire six officers that were denied Manak’s department in 2018.
