WOW-ALONG WITH ALL THE OTHER POLICE FORCE ISSUES NOW WE LEARN THAT THEY AREN"T EVEN THAT GOOD AT THEIR PRIMARY ROLE OF SOLVING CRIMES

Last Friday there was an article in the Waterloo Region Record by Jeff Outhit titled "Police blame clearance rate on "overloaded" officers". This isn't going to go well with the voices that are already demanding that the Waterloo Regional Police lose a significant amount of their funding. My understanding is that critics would like to see various social agencies and groups receive some of the police budget in order to deal with issues such as homelessness, drugs and mental health problems. It does seem that these other groups could do a much better job than police officers who are trained to deal with criminals much more than they are trained to deal with victims of many of these social ills. At the same time diverting these calls away from the police might actually assist the police in spending more of their resources on their core mandate of stopping crime. ............................................................................................... Currently our police are solving about one in three crimes reported to them. I wonder how many crimes aren't even reported in the first place? Overall the statistics are disappointing and our local police are not even doing well on a comparative basis with other police forces in Ontario. Factor this in with lawsuits against the force by their own female officers as well as statistical evidence (carding & or stops) of inherent racism within the force and it becomes apparent that change and improvement are necessary. Of course change does not always equal improvement. That said the staus quo does not seem viable.