Valérian Mazataud Archives Le Devoir The portion of the City's budget devoted to public security will be approximately the same as last year last, but net, expenses allocated to the Montreal City Police will increase by $33.8 million in 2024.
The Montreal Police Service (SPVM) will hire more than a hundred police officers to occupy permanent positions next year, the City of Montreal foresees in its next budget. The municipal administration thus hopes to reduce the use of overtime by its police officers and generate more revenue from fines.
The portion of the City's budget devoted to public security will be roughly the same as last year, but on net, spending allocated to the Montreal police will increase by $33.8 million in 2024. A portion of this amount will go to the addition of 107 permanent positions as police officers within the SPVM, which thus intends to achieve by the end of 2024 its objective of hiring 225 police officers in two years to fight against armed violence.
This 4.3% increase in the SPVM budget, which will thus reach 821.5 million, was also necessary, according to the City, to meet the requirements of the new collective agreement for metropolitan police officers. This provides for an increase in the remuneration of police officers in the metropolis of 20% over five years, significantly more than what the City had anticipated in its budget forecasts.
The Brotherhood of Police Officers of Montreal did not wish to react.
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Less overtime
The City's budget thus provides for expenditures on police remuneration of nearly $634 million next year, an increase of a little more than $35 million compared to the amount that was included in the 2023 budget. However, the actual expenditure on remuneration of the Montreal police in 2023 was 648 million, indicate the City's budget documents, or 14 million more than the expenditure planned in this regard in 2024.
However, the City is counting on the hiring of new police officers next year to reduce its use of overtime, which should, according to it, contribute to reducing its expenses related to the remuneration of police officers, indicated at a press conference on Wednesday the responsible for public security on the board of directors, Alain Vaillancourt. “We think it will have a fairly major impact on overtime,” he commented about these hires which will help meet the needs of different teams at the SPVM.
The City also hopes that the addition of police officers to the SPVM will help increase the revenue it will draw from fines and tickets given to the population. These will reach 211.5 million, the City predicts, an increase of 1.2 million dollars compared to the revenues which had been planned for this purpose in the 2023 budget, and of almost 33 million compared to the actual amount that the SPVM will collect in this way by the end of the year.
“It is certain that if we have more police officers, they will be able to act more in terms of road safety instead of responding to emergencies at 911, which is the priority at the SPVM,” noted Mr. Vaillancourt. Hiring more police officers will allow the City to generate additional revenue from issuing tickets to citizens, agrees the elected official. But the main objective “is to have more police officers near schools and key areas” in order to improve pedestrian safety, argued alongside him the Director General of the City, Serge Lamontagne. /p>
Fire prevention
The Montreal Fire Safety Service, for its part, will see its budget increase by 3.1 million, which will allow it to hire 33 fire prevention specialists, mobilized in particular to inspect buildings at risk. An announcement that comes eight months after the fatal fire that occurred on March 16 in a heritage building which housed several illegal short-term rental homes.
“We are sparing no effort to make Montreal a city safe and that it remains so, that it is a city where life is good and that it can remain so,” said Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante on Wednesday to justify this growth in public security spending. .
The City plans to spend $18.3 million over the next ten years to gradually equip its police officers with body cameras, in a context where the reputation of the SPVM has been damaged in in recent years by allegations of racial profiling.