Belleville Police Chief plays intense bodycam footage during council meeting to justify budget increase

During Belleville’s 2024 operating budget meeting the Police Chief Mike Callaghan presented the 2024 police operating budget, saying “instead of talking about facts and figures for my portion of the presentation today I’m going to talk to you about our budget and its human impact” and played body cam footage of an officer responding to a homicide call with his gun drawn where two armed suspects were still at large and had just run down a dimly lit laneway.

Transcription of Chief’s presentation

I have to turn around and thank the business community, the community at large and our members of the Belleville Police Service for attending today. It shows an emphasis and the importance of the approval of this budget and as the Chief of Police I appreciate your support, so thank you very much.

Instead of talking about facts and figures for my portion of the presentation today I’m going to talk to you about our budget and its human impact and the deputy will have some facts and figures to provide you. It’s a conversation about our budget goals.

We’re living in unprecedented times and who could have predicted that we would see our community afflicted with such acute mental health and addictions. It is truly a societal challenge that we need to overcome together.

I think it’s fair to say that we have all faced mental health challenges personally or with family and friends. Our members experience those challenges every shift and it makes them feel like the mental health and addiction challenges is Groundhog Day every shift.

Our women and men on the front line are facing compassion fatigue and mental health stressors like I have never seen in 39 years of policing. It is so unique and it is such a changing environment and it is evolving every single day.

It was a campaign promise by the mayor to increase the staffing levels of our emergency services and he has been a man of his word and kept his promise. As you have seen, the majority of the increase in our budget is for the sworn officers on our front line which has not been done in almost 15 years for many years.

For many years, Councillor Thompson has repeatedly asked me what I am doing to support the mental health of our frontline officers. Increasing those numbers will go a long way to ensure that they get the time off, breaks, lunches and time to decompress.

One of the things that keeps me up at night is the fact that there are some shifts when we only have five to six officers out in the street. That is not a sustainable funding model. We just can’t do that. When we end up having an individual who is suffering from acute mental health or addictions and we’re off at the hospital we’re now down to possibly three officers across the city. We can’t do that.

Our business owners and our community is expecting more from all of us. With an increase of over 5,000 calls in only two years there is a human toll to our membership. The current staffing numbers that we have we just can’t keep this up.

We can no longer place these kinds of demands on our members without psychologically breaking them. I’m going to repeat that again, we can no longer place these kinds of demands on our members without psychologically breaking them and it’s going to happen. We are currently at a 95% reactive and 5% proactive policing model. That is not the policing model that you want to have in your community, but with that increase of 5,000 calls in only two years there is only so many officers and so many members that we can put out at any given time.

I would like to play a short video for you to allow you to walk in the shoes of Sergeant Brad Stitt on the 18th of September 2023. You are about to see a scenario as recorded by the body warn camera of Sergeant Stitt who had come in to work on an overtime shift because we were so short that evening. Sergeant Stitt arrives at a homicide scene where the two suspects who have just murdered a member of our community are still at large in the area.

Sergeant Stitt arrives on scene at 3:25 a.m. and receives information that two armed suspects have just run down a dimly lit laneway. As there are no other officers available, he’s forced to do this search by himself.

While I recognize that none of you are police officers I would ask you if you would have had the intestinal fortitude to go down that laneway – poorly lit laneway into an ambush situation like he did to ensure that nobody else was going to be injured.

Police Chief Mike Callaghan