Mayor Survey Question 8

Brad Magee:

No. There are many facets to our policing that have not been explored to date. Our current new constables are being trained by officers with one year on the force. I will push to ensure new officers are trained by officers with at least five years on the job. This will aid inadequate training for new officers. We will also work together with our police chief and commissioner to ensure that our concerns are heard. We are also going to utilize all the data collected from our city, to push the provincial government to make the changes needed to our justice system. The provincial government has been making changes but it has been a slow process. I am also going to advocate for a community service program for our lesser offenders and a GPS monitored program for our more serious offenders. Our citizens have had enough of the “slap on the wrist” program. We need to push for harder deterrents to crime.

Ken Johnston:

Care must be taken when we say "defund the police". We simply can't do an ad hoc cut to the police budget. Crime rates and case loads are decreasing in Red Deer so there's an opportunity if this trend continues and in my view that would be at least a three year trend, to reduce the size of the force. This step would only make sense if we had a strong crime prevention program, a judicial system with a drug court and enough prosecutors in combination with the decreasing stats.

Buck Buchanan:

No - I do think the City should have more input into the resourcing issue presently we only have about 50% of our Resources doing Front Line or Response Policing (if there is going to be an issue this is where it will be for Council), I think as a Council we should have more direction over that. I have suggested a Constables Committee in the past and this has been resisted by the Senior Management, my hope for this would be that the people doing the Front Line Services would be heard by Council and be able to address issues that they might be dealing with possibly By-Laws could be structured to assist or Resourcing Issues or Equipment issues may be addressed. In my opinion if we don't know what the problems are how can we try to fix them.