Port Moody’s police chief says his department is having a hard time recruiting and retaining officers.
Dave Fleugel recently told council’s finance committee despite consistent kudos from residents in the city’s annual community survey, the force has lost 39 officers in the past five years. And while they’ve been replaced by 31 new hires, “that creates pressures on trainers and staff to onboard” them as well as increases overtime demands on existing officers to make up for staffing shortages.
“Our vacancy rate is as high as I’ve ever seen it,” Fleugel said. “It keeps me up at night.”
Fleugel’s comments were part of a pitch by Port Moody’s police board that administers the department for a 9.8 per cent increase to its budget for the coming year.
He said his force is facing increasing competition from other police departments that are growing, especially in Surrey, where that city’s new municipal police force is actively recruiting officers to fill out its ranks in advance of the transition from RCMP coverage.
Fleugel said other pressures like technological challenges are also exerting strain on the Port Moody police department. Those include the increasingly complex nature of cars that now necessitates specific expertise in their computer systems that the department doesn’t have when investigating serious and fatal motor vehicle collisions, as well as the imminent implementation of body-worn cameras on officers.
“This technology, whether we like it or not, is going to be the standard for public safety,” Fleugel said of the devices.
As well, Port Moody police is facing higher costs for ECOMM services as a shared dispatch agreement it currently has with New Westminster is being stretched by growth in both cities, said Fleugel.
And Port Moody can no longer bask in its small-town charm, he added.
“We’re not immune from big-city crime,” Fleugel said after relating a story about an international investigation earlier this year after suspects from outside of Canada broke into a Port Moody home that was being used to mine crypto currency and its occupants were bound and beaten for several hours to extract their passwords.
“That just speaks to the level of complexity of some of the crime we have to deal with,” Fleugel said.
To deal with some of those pressures, the police board’s provisional 2025 budget of $16,339,722 includes two new civilian positions to bolster its technology and training needs.
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