The mayor of Esquimalt wants to know how often police officers in her township are responding to incidents in Victoria, information she says was once regularly supplied to council.
Barb Desjardins said Esquimalt council once received regular quarterly reports on how often police cars crossed the bridge to respond to calls in Victoria as part of a police framework agreement, but those reports stopped five or six years ago.
”It’s something that Esquimalt council continues to request every once in a while, but we haven’t seen the return of that data,” she said.
The reason given then for no longer providing the data was that police were “reviewing the information that was being provided and looking at whether it was providing valuable data to council,” Desjardins said.
But recent events are prompting Esquimalt councillors to consider making a formal request for that data as part of quarterly reports, she said.
One of council’s concerns is the impact on policing in Esquimalt of a new protocol that firefighters and paramedics require a VicPD escort before responding to medical calls in the 900-block of Pandora Avenue.
The new procedure follows an incident where a paramedic was kicked in the face while responding to a medical emergency in the area on July 11, and police were subsequently swarmed.
Esquimalt has had a shared-policing agreement with Victoria since 2002 and contributes about 14 per cent of the Victoria Police Department budget, a sum projected to be more than $70 million in 2024.
Desjardins said the agreement stipulates that officers can cross from Esquimalt to Victoria and vice-versa during “extenuating circumstances.”
Victoria police chief Del Manak told Esquimalt council on Monday that the force’s Esquimalt and Victoria divisions have separate supervisors and different policing models, and officers would only cross into each other’s jurisdictions during an “in-progress priority call,” such as during the July 11 Pandora Avenue incident, Manak said.
“All of our available units went and attended to that call, and even that wasn’t enough,” he said. “It was a volatile situation with a larger crowd impeding on the officers where their safety was threatened. We had to call in over 40 police officers from the RCMP, Saanich, Oak Bay and Central Saanich [departments].”
Manak said it’s too early to tell how the extra policing demands on Pandora Avenue will affect the Esquimalt division.
But officers will be deployed from Esquimalt into Victoria if a life is threatened and no police officers in the Victoria division are available, he said.
“I cannot tell you here that I would allow Esquimalt division officers to be doing regular pro-active patrols while an ambulance is staged waiting to respond to an emergency. It just doesn’t make any sense. In fact, it would be irresponsible of me to do so.”
