By Doug Draper, A Commentary
The Niagara Parks Police could soon be history and you may well be asking – ‘Why should I care?’
Some of the Niagara Parks Police, pictured outside the Niagara regional council headquarters recently, following a plea to the council to help their police force survive. Photo courtesy of Niagara Parks Police.
Well this is why you and I and we all should care.
Not only would we be losing one of the oldest police services in Canada, and one with a proven track record for policing the entire length of the Niagara River corridor between Ontario and our neighbours in New York State, with all of the flow of tourists, border smuggling, suicide and daredevil attempts, and all of the rest.
We’d also be trading in a police force that actually pays for itself. That is right, dear readers, the Niagara Parks Police actually pays for itself! And we’d be trading it in for a Niagara Regional Police Service that is already costing the taxpayers of this region well over $100 million annually in operating and infrastructure costs, and continues to table outrageously high increases, year after year, on the belief that the region’s council will probably cave to the forces of the NRP’s union or to some arbitrator the provincial government has appointed in Toronto, who will likely go along with anything the union demands.
At the very least, the loss of the Niagara Parks Police would add another $3 to $4 million per year to our regional government’s budget, and that would right out of Niagara property taxpayers’ wallets. And if the history of the NRP and its union’s demands for extraordinarily more of our taxdollars each year to serve its demands are any example, the dismantling of the Niagara Parks Police will add far more to our tax bills per year than that.
But this is not the most we would lose by possibly blowing away a police force that has had a venerable history along the Ontario/New York border for 123 years. So what in hell are we doing here?
Contact the three elected representatives on the Niagara Regional Police Board. You can do a search and find contact information for them on Niagara Region’s website. They are Fort Erie Mayor Doug Martin, Grimsby Mayor Bob Bentley and Niagara Falls regional councillor, and a former mayor that city, Bill Smeaton. Flood them with email on your views on this, and click on www.nrps.com and find any other contact information you can to send a message right up to the Niagara Regional Police Chief Wendy Southall, if possible.
Can't help posting one more time this historic photo of Niagara Parks Police officers taken some 80 years ago. Just to give us a better idea of how long this force has been patrolling the Niagara River corridor.
Smeaton has been an advocate – virtually a lone voice on the NRP board – for saving the Niagara Parks Police. And it is not clear that anyone else on the board, right up to and including Southall, gives a damn if the Niagara Parks Police continues to exist. That is so because one of the key issues at stake is whether the Niagara Parks Police have their rights renewed to bear arms -– meaning carrying a gun in a holster, for the most part – and if they can’t, they are probably through. If they can’t pull over a car late at night or go down Niagara Glen or some other gorge area in the dark, following some distress call, without a little protection, or at least the same level of protection a Niagara Regional Police officer would have, then why should they? Why would they? Would you?
Yet these are officers that have the same training as other police officers across the province and, according to a recent letter published in area newspapers by Ontario Community Safety and Correctional Services Minister Rick Bartolucci, it is really up to the Niagara Regional Police Board to renew their right to carry a gun. Without approval by the NRP board, he said in the same April 30 letter, his ministry “cannot act.”
So what gives with the NRP board? Hopefully this is not about expanding the jurisdiction of the Niagara Regional Police force at the expense of the Niagara Parks Police and the taxpayers of this region. Please don’t tell already beleaguered property taxpayers across this region that!
(Click on www.niagaraatlarge.com for Niagara At Large and more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater binational Niagara)
Many of the powers-that-be sitting on most boards in Niagara or functioning as petty local bureaucrats harbour a pervasive, harmful attitude. That attitude is to centralize services in general while reflexively downsizing or eliminating them out on the edges of the region. The Niagara Parks Police appear to be the most recent potential ‘victims’ of this kind of mindless mental proclivity. The excellent Parks Police are in danger of elimination just like the former excellent hospitals in Port Colborne and Fort Erie were stupidly lost. Some of the worst functionaries with the narrow-minded mindset that lets such happen, such as Mayor Martin of Fort Erie (who also fiddles while sitting on the Police Commission), seem to be completely oblivious of their own microscopic thought processes – let alone the negative effect they have on everyone around them. Sinclair Lewis wrote of these mindless rural Babbitt-types decades ago in his books, ‘Babbitt’ and ‘Arrowsmith.’ What to do about these unconscious, passive ‘destroyers-in-our-midst,’ while they’re still ensconced in power, remains an unsolved problem. One wonders if they even have enough brains to be embarrassed into doing what’s right – keep the Parks Police.
Doug and Dr Hogg,
I completely agree. Keep the Parks Police. I’m not a fan of the younger, tougher, more arrogant NRP and their efforts to turn Niagara into a rights-free zone, demanding innocent people surrender ID for no damn reason at all.
NRP Chief Wendy is in cahoots with TO Chief Bliar on the long gun registry, meaning she cares more about appearances of doing something than actually doing something… and she does not care that appearance costs more than performance.
A Police force which supports itself ! Why would we care to dismantle this force ? If there was an emergency in Niagara and most of the police forces were called to another area who would be left to protect or respond in this region..obviously no one would be available…no foresite here I believe !!