Police Services Board meeting at City Hall

There were several stories at the Hamilton Police Service’s Board meeting Tuesday. One of them is the new location, the other is the reinstatement of City Councillor Terry Whitehead to the board. Sean Leathong was at City Hall and has more on the proceedings.

The Police Services Board meeting has just wrapped up less than a half-hour ago in City Hall behind me and the decision they came to on the tasers is that they’re going to put the report that was presented a month ago to council. Just a refresher, that was to have 6 new trained officers in the city of Hamilton and that will cost about a million dollars. And that will be until after the budgetary process for next year. So it could be February or March before we know if that has been implemented.

And Chief Glenn De Caire and the rest of the Police Services Board meeting was in the council chambers, we know that it was because of the groundswell of support from the Dorr and Mesic families and their supporters last time that they decided to move this to city hall. There were a few new faces and changes that he had to go into today. The first was to nominate a new chair. That turned out to be councillor Bernie Morelli. He’s replacing Mayor Bob Bratina who resigned less than a month ago.

And, of course Terry Whitehead. He had been on suspension since June. After the investigation, Whitehead felt exonerated:   “Whether I called the Chief a liar of not is fact. And it’s something I regret and I apologise for it. I believe that the board looked at all the circumstances around these events and came to their own conclusions.”

We will find out in a few months time if the taser program goes forward, but I spoke to Norm Dorr after the meeting and he said that was one way to help the officers hopefully have less people shot by police.