On May 4, Toronto police received a tip about a baggie of cocaine hidden in a parking lot in the city’s west end.

So the cops went, waited and, when a man showed up, they arrested him — but not before he tried to flee and assault two officers, police say.

He was charged with nine offences including escaping lawful custody, assault to resist arrest and possession of proceeds of crime. How many officers did it take to make the arrest and prepare the case for court?

Thirteen.

The two officers allegedly assaulted, a supervisor on scene, an officer who seized the cocaine, one who seized the money, an exhibits officer, two officers who transported the accused to hospital, two who transported him to the station, one who impounded the accused’s rental car, one crime scene officer, and one who seized property/evidence.

The case highlights both the challenges and the debate around Toronto Police Service spending and manpower needs in an era of falling crime rates.

“On the one hand, it’s simply the start of one of those ‘how-many-does-it-take’ jokes; on the other hand, it suggests the TPS is badly overstaffed,” says defence lawyer Reid Rusonik, who represents the accused in this “typical, simple street-level drug case.”

Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, said he fails to see how Rusonik’s “anecdotal experience” has anything to do with police staffing.

“What does four or five, 10 officers being involved in a single arrest have to do with what we do on a day-to-day analysis? It’s like saying, ‘Oh, I saw six officers standing outside a coffee shop,’ therefore we don’t need $5,400, we only need $4,300?”

The Charter, defence lawyer challenges, earlier judicial decisions and added oversight have all made policing more complex and driven up the time spent on priority calls from 163 minutes to 487 minutes, he adds. “There’s so much accountability,” says McCormack, recently acclaimed for another three-year term.

Law enforcement costs in Toronto have ballooned to nearly $1 billion, with salaries and benefits representing 90 per cent of the TPS’s operating budget. A decade ago, the police budget was about $550 million when there were 5,048 uniformed officers on the payroll, compared with today’s 5,400.

The police budget is under scrutiny again after Police Chief Bill Blair said he can’t meet the city’s demand to freeze next year’s budget without cutting 189 jobs, which he is “not recommending.”

Layoffs will “seriously impact” the delivery of policing services, he warned. Police will take longer to respond to calls, “enforcement levels” will be reduced — as will the number of convictions and crimes cleared. Blair also wants a hiring freeze lifted to keep the current complement of 5,400, which he says is below “the current city and board-approved authorized strength.”

The Toronto Police Services Board has told him to return next month, identifying where he can cut spending.

Despite talk of diminished service, criminologists and social scientists say there is no evidence police staffing levels have any effect on the crime rate.

“Look to other social factors to explain crime, which is itself a complicated construct,” says Tammy Landau, a criminologist at Ryerson University.

Rather than counting police, she says, tally the young males living in a community between 15 and 24 who “are at the highest risk of committing crime,” or examine the social conditions in communities “where there is great economic disparity … poverty beside great wealth.”

Police spend only a small percentage of their time engaged in “crime-fighting,” and don’t do much with respect to preventing crime, Landau added.

“They mostly provide social order, like policing parades and traffic, or provide services, like looking for missing kids or taking vulnerable people to appropriate facilities,” she says. “Most of policing is reactive. They respond to calls from the public, rather than detect it from being out on patrol.”

McCormack agrees police can’t solve society’s social problems. But he scoffs at the suggestion there’s no connection between cops and crime rates. “If everybody in the police service phoned in sick for two weeks, would there be an increase in crime?”

Effective deployment, having officers “engaged in intelligence-led police work does have an impact on crime,” he said.

It’s also expensive. After the Danzig Street shootings this summer, police beefed up their presence in crime hot spots. In September, Blair attributed a drop in violent crime to the deployment that came with a $2-million overtime bill.

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So how many police officers does Toronto actually need?

American police scholar David Bayley, in his 1994 book Police For the Future, wrote that there is a point where police numbers would make a difference in how much crime occurs.

“If there was a police officer on every corner on every doorstep, crime would surely go down.”

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