IN TIMES OF RECESSION, THE COUNTRY NEEDS MORE POLICE

Drug addictions breed thievery. Gangs breed thievery. Recessions
breed thievery. And right now Canada --like most industrialized
countries -- is having significant problems with all three of these:
drug addiction, gangs and one whopper of a crime-breeding recession.

Statistics will tell you that crime rates have been down in recent
years. But yesterday's statistics won't tell you what is happening
today. Nor do statistics reflect crimes that go unreported because
victims know that the police are stretched too thin to deal with them.

So Canadians should get ready for more break-ins and robbery of all
kinds. They should also expect more of the kind of violence that
often goes with this stuff. Convenience stores in all kinds of
Canadian communities are already getting whacked.

What can governments do about it? Well, I believe in social workers
as much as the next Liberal, but more police also have to be part of
the solution, especially when the police are doing a lot of the
social work in Canadian communities right now.

The bad cops who fire Tasers at the wrong time and drop drunks off at
the outskirts of town grab the headlines, but a lot of good cops have
been saving the lives of a lot of street people in recent years.

We need more police on the streets, but we also need more police at
our airports and seaports, at our border crossings and on the Great
Lakes. These are all vulnerable areas that American and Canadian
security officials are worried about.

I said we need more cops. I didn't say we need more prisons. The
federal government likes to bellow macho manifestos about getting
tougher on sentencing, but prisons create more crime than they
prevent. If the American experience tells us anything, it is that
prisons are a cop-out when it comes to preventing crime.

Let's focus instead on better policing. And let's start with the
RCMP. The modest investments the federal government has talked about
making in better policing have all but ignored the RCMP, but the
Senate committee on national security and defence estimates that our
county needs somewhere between 5,300 and 6,500 additional Mounties to
supplement the 17,000-plus officers now in uniform.

These officers would make the lives of Canadians more secure in small
towns and big cities alike. They would help strengthen our economic
relationship with the United States to help pull us out of the
recession because they would make our borders more secure, and help
jump-start the process of unclogging crossings between the two countries.

If you think we've got more than enough Mounties to go around,
consider a few facts that may make your head swim:

- - While the U.S. Coast Guard patrols the Great Lakes with 2,200
officers, the best Canada has been able to offer up are 14 Mounties.
The Americans keep asking us to team up with them to fight crime on
the border, but the RCMP just doesn't have the funding to provide
personnel to join them.

- - Canada's ports are riddled with crime, but the Mounties don't have
the officers to do much about it. Huge gaps in security leave our
ports vulnerable to both criminals and terrorists. We need 900 more
Mounties to police our ports properly.

- - The committee heard testimony that the Mounties can only keep tabs
on one-third of the criminal organizations in Canada that it knows
exist, let alone all the others it hasn't found yet.

- - A 2002 study showed that Canada ranked 19th out of 23 OECD
countries in police officers per capita -- our number of police per
capita was 186 per 100,000 people. Australia, a comparable society,
came in at 305 officers per 100,000 people.

- - Statistics Canada data for 2008 showed that Canada has climbed all
the way up to 196 officers per 100,000 people. Wow! Unfortunately, we
have a much larger increase in problems with drugs, gangs, terrorism
and the recession.

- - Police work has become increasingly time-consuming for a variety of
reasons. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is essential to modern
Canadian society, but the time it takes for police to comply with its
strictures means it takes three officers to do the work that two used
to do. A break-and-enter case that took an hour to investigate in
1970 is now likely to take between five and 10 hours.

Luckily, Canadians need more police at a time when Canadians are in
desperate need of good jobs.

Being a police officer is a very good job, even if the government is
squeezing the RCMP on salaries, just like it is squeezing the rest of
the public service. Squeezing police salaries is not a smart idea
when we need the very best kind of people to get into the RCMP and
help revive the organization's proud traditions.

I say stop pontificating about tougher prison sentences. Give us more
quality humans to fight the good fight for a humane society.

Colin Kenny is chair of the Senate committee on national security and defence.