The New Westminster Police Department is facing “unprecedented” staffing challenges – with all divisions short on staff.
Deputy Chief Const. Paul Hyland provided a verbal update about staffing levels at the police board’s most recent meeting. Having done a bunch of ride-alongs with patrol members in the summer, he said he believes the department’s morale is very good – even though it’s short on staff throughout the organization.
According to Hyland, the NWPD is budgeted for 114 FTEs (full-time equivalents) and is currently sitting at about 111. In addition to those three “hard vacancies,” he said the department often has 20 or more FTEs who are considered “soft vacancies” and aren’t working at any given time – including recruits who are still in training and officers who are on maternity and paternity leaves.
“That brings us down into the low 90s, so most of the units in the organization are running with vacancies,” he told the board. “Patrol, as it stands today, is down about seven bodies.”
The NWPD’s patrol division has about 40 employees, so being short seven constables is “significant,” Hyland said.
“This is kind of across the board in policing, certainly in this province,” he said. “It's very challenging – if you have members leave the organization – to replace them in a short period of time.”
While the NWPD’s senior management team tries to anticipate trends, such as retirements, and plan accordingly, Hyland noted it takes about a year to train a recruit and get them on the road. He said the NWPD hired 15 people last year; it is looking at hiring another three to five officers this year and is targeting another four recruits for the January class at the Justice Institute of B.C.
Hyland said the New Westminster Police Department saw a number of officers leave the department last year, and has had a few more leave again recently. He said some officers have relocated to be closer to loved ones (including one who had a fiancé in Alberta), to live in a place that’s more affordable and to take jobs in other policing agencies, but some have cited “staffing and workload” as a major issue.
Hyland said New Westminster’s overall Crime Severity Index (which includes all Criminal Code violations) rose in 2021, as did the city’s violent crime index, which went up 28 per cent in 2021. He said those types of calls take time for officers to investigate.
“It is something that we as the senior leadership team are monitoring,” he said. “I look at our stats in the last five years, the population in New West has gone up 10,000 and is projecting in another five years, it's going to go up another 10,000. That's going to increase our workload. … We don't want to burn our staff out.”
If all of the department’s 114 FTEs were working all the time, Hyland said officers would be in a much better position to keep their heads above water, but he’s said the trend has been to have about 20 “soft vacancies” in the organization at any one time.
Despite the staffing challenges, Hyland said New Westminster has a “gem” of a police department. He said today’s officers are diverse, educated, caring and compassionate.
“The work that they're doing now is very different from what we did 25 years ago. You go to the calls now, a lot of them, a good percentage of the calls, they're socially-based calls. And it’s challenging work,” he said. “They are put into situations where people, for a variety of reasons, are in crisis. And they do an amazing job.”
Unprecedented challenges
Chief Const. Dave Jansen said staffing is an issue that the police board will be working on closely in 2023. In an interview with the Record, Jansen said the ongoing staffing challenges in the police department are unprecedented during his nearly-33 years on the job.
“I've never seen anything like it,” he said. “Maybe we did have some periods of time where that did occur, but not a situation like this, where it's just continual. And it's been this way for a while.”
Jansen said the staffing challenges are due to a combination of many different issues. He noted that other organizations, including the City of New Westminster, are struggling to fill vacancies.
According to Jansen, about 13 or 14 offices have left the NWPD to take jobs with Surrey’s new municipal police department.
“We're losing officers to Surrey; we're losing officers to other jobs, like out of policing,” he said. “And then there’s the time it takes to train a recruit; it's not quite a year, but it's almost a year from the time you hire them until you can actually deploy them on the road by themselves.”
Jansen noted the NWPD currently has 10 police officers in various stages of training at the Justice Institute of B.C. Although they’re all included in the department’s allocated strength and are on the department’s payroll, they’re not deployable as police officers until their training is complete.
A younger department, the NWPD currently has about six officers who are on maternity and paternity leave.
Jansen said the police board will be discussing how to build capacity internally so it’s able to fill in some of these gaps that occur – and will continue to occur – when folks are off on maternity or paternity leave, are off work due to injuries or are still attending the police academy.
With the number of FTEs now in the low 90s, Jansen said the department is short more than 20 officers to deploy on the road.
“Every unit in the department is short. Some of them more so than others,” he said. “We really need to be led by stats and we really need to be led by intelligence in regards to how we're deploying those officers.”
According to Jansen, some watches (patrol shifts) are running short by three to five staff. He said the staffing challenges have affected all areas, from the traffic unit (which was down to one officer) to patrol.
“Every section of the department is short, every one,” he said. “Everyone's got to carry these vacancies. But I would say that, generally speaking, the one – because they're the biggest section in our department that always feels the brunt of it the most in the short-term – is patrol division, so our front-line officers. We have our minimums that we run with – it doesn't mean that you want to run on those minimums all the time, but more often than not, we are now running at minimums.”
Jansen said staffing and workload challenges will be a topic for the New Westminster police board.
“Calls aren't going down, generally speaking, and they're certainly more complex,” he said. “We're going to come up with some more information, probably in the next month or two about some specific areas.”
