The Altona Police Service (APS) will be upgrading some of their digital equipment, following a significant increase in the province’s annual Public Safety funding grant.
The Province of Manitoba provides the grant to all police services across Manitoba, but the amount had been frozen for several years while they worked on a new funding formula. Municipalities are generally unaware of how much of this funding they will receive when calculating and approving their operating budgets every year.
“They assume the funding for any given year will be the same as the previous year, and approve their operating budget based on this assumption,” explained Altona Police Chief Dan Defer.
The Town of Altona calculated the 2023 provincial grant at $473,600 but were advised last July that the provincial grant had been raised to $614,057.97, an increase of $140,457.97.
The newly allocated funds are intended to specifically address the rising costs associated with municipal policing. The increases are a result of both higher crime rates and inflationary pressures, according to Justice Minister Kelvin Goertzen at the time of the announcement last July.
The APS saw this funding increase an opportunity to expedite upgrades to some of their operating equipment, but since the town’s annual budget for 2023 was already approved earlier this year, the Altona Police Board, in conjunction with APS, requested a review of the police budget with the goal of increasing it to allow the department to make three capital budget purchases this calendar year.
They believed that addressing a few capital items now with the increased funding from the province will assist in alleviating some of the financial stress in future budgets.
Their proposal included the purchase of required components to upgrade their Livescan digital fingerprinting device.
“The unit needs to be replaced. It’s already on borrowed time and is no longer supported and is getting glitches,” Defer said. “Having this device unavailable for any great length of time would cause major issues to this service. All required fingerprinting would have to go through the Winkler Police Service, at their convenience.”
The APS also wants to replace the department’s computers to make them all compatible with Windows 11 and enhance the professional monitoring contract to lessen the threat from increased cyber attacks.
“We’ve been operating on eight-year-old computers, and they’re no longer supported by any new operating systems. Those definitely needed an upgrade,” Defer said.
Part of the cost of equipment replacement would also include upgrading their monitoring agreement. The agreement currently utilized by the APS is such that in the event of a successful cyber attack, the insurance policy held by the Town of Altona would not cover these attacks, as the police does not meet the minimum requirements for coverage.
“Cyber attacks are real. Since September, there have been 30,970 attempts to access our network,” Defer said. “We wanted to go into the new year with everybody on the same page.”
The department also intended to replace their current allotment of Tasers with four new, less lethal conductive energy weapons.
Last month, Altona council formally approved the requested $73,778.57 of the provincial grant for immediate use by the department.
The funding will cover the $22,875 cost of the Livescan upgrade, and $47,704 for the new computers.
Defer said due to a significant cost increase for the Tasers, they want to revisit other options.
“In order for this to go ahead, invoicing must be sent to us before Dec. 31 this budget year. With the research we want to do, that puts us into January or February, so we’ll put that purchase on hold and review it next year.”
Altona Police Board chair Audrey Schmidt said council had previously approved $12,000 in the budget for the Livescan upgrade.
“We know there are going to be additional costs for everything these days, but we were surprised at the $10,000 increase in the price of the Livescan. So, you need to think of these added costs moving forward. We have the funding now, let’s take that out of the equation.
“The grant is designated for public safety, so it could have been used in many ways outside of the police,” she noted. “They wanted to make sure the police had the money so our public was safe. It’s the inflationary costs we’re trying to avoid.”
The new components for the Livescan and the computers have already been ordered.
“And next year, that money will be there again, but it will be there at the beginning of the year, and we won’t have to go through this additional approval process,” said Schmidt.
