The Toronto Police Service can lift a hiring freeze and still trim $100 million from its budget — and downsize the force to 4,750 uniform officers — by 2019, Mayor John Tory said Wednesday.

The number of TPS staff leaving the service this year is “running quite ahead of what was projected,” so allowing a “very modest amount” of hiring will permit the police service from “being reduced too fast in size,” Tory told reporters at an unrelated announcement on transit.

It “is just a sensible thing for us to do to preserve a safe city while staying on track with respect to the overall goal and the budget,” Tory said.

About 300 TPS staff members, including 191 uniform officers, have resigned, retired or moved to other forces this year — more than double the average number of “separations,” according to the Toronto Police Association which represents more than 8,000 members.

A policing task force report aimed at cutting costs — and modernizing Canada’s largest municipal force —recommended no new uniform officers be hired over three years, leading to a reduction in the number of officers, through attrition, to about 4,750 by 2019.

The task force estimated the hiring freeze and promotion moratorium would reduce the budget by $60 million and identified another $40 million in efficiencies and savings.

The Toronto Police Association has been fighting the move to reduce the ranks, launching a public relations campaign suggesting a leaner force puts the safety of Torontonians at risk. That prompted Tory to recently accuse TPA president Mike McCormack of “lobbing hand grenades” from the sidelines.

But the mayor said Wednesday the heated rhetoric is over — at least for now — after the union agreed to work with the board to achieve “the ultimate objective of modernizing the force, including a more efficient deployment of police resources.”

That includes looking “at everything,” including the shift schedule, which is part of the collective agreement and a bone of contention between the service and TPA, the mayor said.

The last four-year contract, signed in 2015, established joint committees to look at the compressed work week and the requirement for two-officer patrol cars at night. A 2011 Ernst & Young efficiency report found a shift schedule changed could result in $25 million in savings.

Nothing materialized — nor did anything change after the union agreed to a similar arrangement in 2005.

Tory said it was a “significant step forward” that the city has a new partnership with the union while the service continues to implement the modernization “action plan” to relieve pressure on the workload of uniform police officers.

“We’re moving ahead with all of those changes but it takes time,” Tory said.

The service wants to change its delivery model, so that highly trained — and expensive — front-line officers are responding to emergencies not nabbing drivers for making illegal left-hand turns.

The plan calls for the diverting some 911 calls to other city departments and service providers, expanding alternative reporting methods for non-emergency crimes, using lesser-paid civilians to do some duties currently performed by officers, and consolidating some police divisions.

David Soknacki, a former city councillor, budget chair, and member of the policing task force that recommended the hiring moratorium, wasn’t concerned about its lifting if it means the union is now onside.

“If this means a realization by the collective bargaining units that in fact this is the way of the future and it’s good for everyone, bringing in new staff, which will be trained in the new environment, it will help us to where we want to go,” he said Wednesday.

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But Soknacki warned the police service must do everything it can to achieve the $100 million target.

“You’ve got to have the $100 million in savings to send the message that transformation is here, it can be done, the police can manage their affairs, and the police is cognizant of living in the broader context of the city of Toronto,” he said.

If they fail to hit the $100 million target, it makes it difficult to ask other city divisions and agencies hold the line on spending.

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