Police patrols aimed at reducing robberies and theft at retail stores will become a permanent facet of policing in Winnipeg, Manitoba Justice Minister Matt Wiebe said Thursday.

The announcement took the City of Winnipeg by surprise at time when Mayor Scott Gillingham is pressing the provincial government to provide the city with more funding for policing, along with other municipal services.

As part of a 28-page public safety strategy unveiled by Wiebe at The Forks over the lunch hour, the NDP government committed to making a temporary program dubbed the retail crime initiative a permanent fixture in Winnipeg.

The province initially announced in May that it was allocating funding to pay for police to work overtime in areas identified as retail theft hot spots. It allocated another $1.16 million for the initiative in a July extension, and then extended it again last month, before making it permanent this week.

"This is about providing those retailers not only with investigation and preventative support, but also the kind of support that just shows a presence, shows a connection and gives the officers who are otherwise stretched thin to do the work they otherwise couldn't do," Wiebe said Thursday, flanked by senior members of the Winnipeg Police Service.

The retail crime initiative, Wiebe said, may not be solely devoted to retail crime. The police service will dictate precisely where additional officers need to work, the minister said.

"We'll leave the operational decisions to the experts and you see them beside me. They're going to decide where the need is," Wiebe said.

The Winnipeg Police Service declined to elaborate on that statement. Mayor Gillingham, who spoken publicly about requests for more provincial funding for police, also declined to comment.

Winnipeg Police Board chair Markus Chambers, who was not invited to Wiebe's press conference, said he and other city officials are now trying to discern what the provincial government is planning in terms of policing.

"I am disappointed I didn't learn about this sooner," Chambers, the city councillor for St. Norbert-Seine River, said Thursday at an unrelated event. "We will dig into this and find out what this means for the City of Winnipeg."

The Retail Council of Canada, which originally teamed up with Winnipeg police on the initiative, said it is pleased the government is focusing on stopping retail theft, but expressed concerns about Wiebe's suggestion officers could be deployed elsewhere.

"To ensure these resources remain focused on retail crime versus being eventually pulled into other commitments, we will be encouraging the formation of a retail crime unit where at least some of these new officers could be assigned," Prairie government relations director John Graham told the Canadian Press in an email.

Wiebe said the province will help the city hire 12 new officers to staff the retail crime initiative. Those officers are already being trained and will graduate before June, he said.

Chambers expressed concern the city may not have the resources to sustain more funding for police.

The city, he said, requires "more money from the from the province to look at the sustainability of adding more officers, whether it's the violent retail crime initiative, whether it's downtown patrols."

In October, Gillingham spoke publicly about his request for the province to provide the city with more operational funding before city council's budget working group completes the first draft of the city's spending plans for 2025. The first draft of next year's budget is expected to be made public in December.

Wiebe said the province will help Winnipeg and other Manitoba municipalities by increasing funding for municipal policing by two per cent across the province.

That would fall short of the annual spending hike on policing in Winnipeg.

While the 2024 budget called for a 2.1 per cent hike in police spending, a mounting tab for police overtime is expected to result in an actual year-to-year police spending variance of 5.6 per cent.

Wiebe said the province is making up for that by funding more police officers. The opposition Progressive Conservatives said the NDP is merely following through on a 2023 budget commitment by former premier Heather Stefanson's government.

"It's looking like they're repackaging our initiatives," PC interim leader Wayne Ewasko said, "and rolling it out with their own spin."

The province's public safety strategy also called for the government to follow through on a 2023 election campaign promise to hire 100 more mental-health workers.

Wiebe also said the province will strengthen impaired driving legislation and expand electronic monitoring of convicted criminals outside Winnipeg.

A total of 14 people are being monitored in the city right now, he said.