Police services board meeting

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Eric Girt attended his first Police Services board meeting as police chief Thursday afternoon, making a case that Hamilton Police should be allowed to keep a multimillion dollar surplus from last year and use it to fund their new forensics headquarters.

Today, the Police Services Board approved the use of a $3.6 million budget surplus, for the construction of Hamilton Police’s new $17 million investigative headquarters. Now that’s $3.6 million dollars of tax payers’ money. Just last year the then Police Chief Glen de Caire was grilled about keeping a much smaller $1.8 million dollar surplus.

When asked about why there was such a big surplus, Councillor Lloyd Ferguson insisted the 2015 budget wasn’t “padded”, so that a surplus could be available for the building. When asked, Chief Girt said it was largely due to a result of the previous chief’s controversial decision to suspend vacations during the Pan Am Games last summer.

Other alarming numbers are the amounts of homicides this year. Back in 2015 there were a total of 6 homicides. 2016 isn’t even half way over and the city is already at 10.

The Board also highlighted the results of last year’s success with their Crisis Response Unit, that deals with mental health crisis. Data showed their service helped nearly 1200 people get the mental health services they needed instead of being brought to a hospital like they would have if it were just police responding to the call and not the trained response team.