Toronto police to hire 80 new officers by end of the year
Posted August 10, 2017 6:51 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Toronto police say they will be hiring as many as 80 new officers in 2017, ending a hiring freeze that had been implemented as part of the Transformational Task Force.
The decision was reached following a meeting of the Toronto Police Services Board, the Toronto Police Service and the Toronto Police Association, who say attrition has run slightly ahead of the task force’s assumptions.
Almost 200 officers have left the force so far this year.
The news comes on the heels of an unofficial Toronto police work to rule that has been quietly going on for the past month leading to lengthy response times.
“I think it is a victory for the Toronto Police Service, I think it is a victory for the public and I think it is a victory for my members,” police union boss Mike McCormack tells CityNews.
“Again, we weren’t against modernization or what policing may look like in 2019 but what we were about was what was that journey going to look like. When we didn’t have what we thought were the right amount of police officers on the street, the right amount of civilians to back up those police officers, we were very concerned about it.”
McCormack added he would “encourage out officers to go out there and do their job each and every day.”
The three groups say they remain “aligned” on the objectives articulated in the task force report which is supposed to be a blueprint for modernizing the police service.
