Toronto police issued significantly fewer charges under the Highway Traffic Act in 2013 than they did in each of the five previous years, according to data obtained by the Star from the Ministry of the Attorney General.

Statistics show there were 31 per cent fewer charges in 2013 than in 2012 — a difference of about 131,000 individual charges under the Highway Traffic Act. The number translates into possible missed revenues of between $6 million and $8 million, according to the city’s budget chief, Frank Di Giorgio.

“There’s no question that it means less money coming in,” he said. Di Giorgio said the dip in charges may have been a deliberate attempt to demonstrate the effects of budget pressures and a three-year hiring freeze on the force.

“What the chief chose to do is say, ‘Well, that’s fine, if you the council don’t understand or don’t see having fewer police officers, the best way to demonstrate it is to have less revenue come in to the city,’” said Di Giorgio.

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Police and the police union reject any suggestion that the drop in tickets was part of a backlash against budget measures.

“There’s absolutely no substance to that. We have always operated on the basis that our focus is public safety, and we are not concerned with anything other than public safety,” said police spokesman Mark Pugash.

Pugash said a variety of factors contributed to the drop.

“We have had fewer police officers each year for the last several years. What we’re also doing is focusing our efforts on where they will do the most good. We’ve also become much more involved in public education,” said Pugash.

“We’re still out there enforcing the laws, but what we're also doing is trying to use our people in a way that might result in people committing fewer offences. The issue is not about offences — the issue is public safety.”

Police union president Mike McCormack said the demands on police have increased to the point where officers are moving directly from one call to the next.

“We’re down approximately 340 (officers) from our strength of what it was three years ago,” said McCormack. “The number one issue for our members is they’re stressed out. They’re stressed because they’re bouncing from call to call and they don’t feel that there’s enough time in the day to effectively do their jobs in pro-active and reactive policing.”

According to figures from the Ministry of the Attorney General, Toronto police issued 425,794 charges under the Highway Traffic Act in 2012, including offences such as speeding, distracted driving and careless driving. In 2013, they laid 294,407 charges under the same act — a difference of 131,387 charges.

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The drop came during a year when fatalities involving motor vehicles in Toronto peaked at 63 people dead, the highest number since 2004. But fatalities alone are a poor measure of actual road safety, according to Mike Brady, head of the city’s Traffic Safety Unit.

He said overall collisions — numbers that won’t be available until later in February — provide better information about road safety.

“You really have to look at multiple factors together to see if the numbers we use to measure things are really reflective of the environment that we’re trying to measure,” said Brady. “Comparing fatal numbers from year to year is not representative of what’s going on here.”

The slide was first noticed by paralegals who specialize in fighting traffic tickets. Christian Egsgard, who has been fighting tickets for 17 years and spent 20 years as a police officer in York Region, said he’s never seen a situation quite like it.

“It’s been quite drastic. I just don’t get it,” said Egsgard, who added that his business is down as much as 22 per cent.

Said Easa, a civil engineering professor at Ryerson University, called the change “significant.”

“It looks like it’s not part of random variation from one year to the other. Something happened — something significant that caused that to happen,” said Easa. It can’t be explained as the result of a safety education campaign, he said. “This is just too significant of a number to be attributed to education.”

Councillor Michael Thompson, vice-chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, sees the reduction in charges as a sign of people obeying the law.

“This is not a revenue-generating process that we simply have a system to generate revenues. We want people to obey the rules and follow the laws, and if more people are doing that, that’s fantastic news,” said Thompson. “With respect to parking enforcement and traffic activities, I think that there are enough officers out there doing their work.”