Nearly 5% increase in proposed Sudbury police budget

The Greater Sudbury Police Service is requesting an increase for the 2020 budget.

GSPS presented the 2020 proposed budget to the police board on Friday afternoon which includes an increase of 4.94 per cent bringing the budget to nearly $63 million.

Police Chief Paul Pedersen says the focus of the proposed budget is mental health and wellness for the officers.

"One of the things I'll highlight, is we've put an additional $25,000 in the budget for members support... we're seeing a significant impact of occupational stress injury, post-traumatic stress injury in our members and they need help, so this is an investment in their wellness," said Pedersen.

He says right now, members only have $1,000 a year for psychological services and the proposed budget increases that amount.

"We're hoping that by being able to support them, we're going to get them back to work and back to life better."

Pedersen says the increase in the budget is also to add more personnel.

"We're adding a couple of our community safety personnel people and those are unique positions to Sudbury, [it] takes work away from the frontline but it's still important work that the public expects from us," he said.

"Things like traffic safety education, youth education, things like online reporting and the follow-ups that come from that, picking up surveillance videos from the community all of that could be done by people without guns, tasers and pepper spray."

The proposed budget also sees an increase in members to look into cyber crime, which has been growing each year.

"The cyber crime area includes internet child exploitation areas is just a significant area of growth, a significant challenge for us to try and stay under it, so by assigning members to that investigative capacity we're able to take work away from the frontline members which allows our uniform members to focus on some of the other pressures," said Pedersen.

He says it allows officers to focus on other concerns, like traffic safety and concerns.

The Greater Sudbury Police Board will present the proposed budget to city council for the upcoming budget deliberations.