Missing from rants against policing costs in Saanich and other municipalities are the victims, whose lives will be ruined if not eliminated. Poor people are especially harmed as they have the least financial resiliency to recover from loss of property and from loss of income due to injury from assault.
READ MORE: Saanich council cuts back budget lift for police
Beware that statistics have traps of incorrect categorization and of omission, and have to be considered in context. This area, for example, has an intoxicant culture that promotes consumption, with a high rate of drunk driving. Saanich is on the way from Esquimalt, Oak Bay and Victoria to the ferry terminal, the West Shore, and up Island, and on the route from the Swartz Bay ferry terminal to up Island. Doesn’t that also increase police workload?
There are many types of crime, including telephone and the internet facilitating fraud and child molestation. Police have to spend time and money to trace them, as Saanich and Victoria police have done with child molesters who tried to hide their identity by digitally altering photographs.
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Along with standard activities such as watching suspects, which is how police in Washington state obtained enough evidence to convict the raping killer of a young couple from Saanich. Needing body material to analyze for DNA they watched him until a coffee cup fell from his work truck. It’s costly in police time but they got their man.
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Note that much police paperwork comes from a more litigious society, requiring extra thoroughness to fend off shysters dragging out court proceedings until a tired judge acquits an assailant, and defend themselves against people who call police to help with a violent relative then sue police when the perpetrator dies from police defending themselves as well.
And Stan Bartlett and friends attack policing costs on the basis of tax levels, when they should well know there is much inefficiency and profligacy in typical governments that could be eliminated to pay for policing – as I have detailed many times.
READ MORE: Grumpy Taxpayers criticize Saanich police request for five per cent budget increase
I ask each councillor why they think the current situation of people being run down, robbed, raped and murdered on the streets of Saanich is a proper type of society for honest humans.
There’s an anti-human notion that mediocre is good, so Saanich should be mediocre like other fiefdoms. That doesn’t match Saanich’s PR.
I want better policing, which is the moral purpose of government. Humans live by our mind but initiation of force prevents use of your mind by preventing the life-sustaining actions you decide on.
Keith Sketchley
Saanich