The spending of Kingston police over the first nine months of the year was $500,000 over budget.
According to the crime figures, the past nine months have been extremely busy, according to John Howes, director of finance for the City of Kingston.
Without adding the phoney homecoming weekend last week, which required over 300 officers to watch with assistance from the OPP and Ottawa police, the report claims that nearly half of the overtime pay was used to monitor Queen’s University celebrations, costing a total of $211,000 dollars.
Inspector Brian Pete noted, “These weekends are quite huge police operations; they have a lot of moving parts.” “Therefore, just meals and lodging for visiting partners is fairly costly. ”
Along the St.
Patrick’s Day weekend, police spent $83,000 that was not budgeted to staff the university district with officers. In contrast, only $2,000 was spent on the same celebrations in 2021.
During the month of September, another $128,000 was spent on surveillance of the university district. And the price is only anticipated to rise.
“As we head into the last quarter of course we are going to be spending a fair bit on the Queen’s activity.
We probably spent slightly under a million dollars last year, therefore Howes predicted that the deficit would increase in the final three months of the year.
It’s not just the Queen’s Day festivities that keep Kingston police busy, though. Kingston Police claims it wants to be compensated for the $26,000 it spent on providing officers for the Ottawa freedom convoy protest.
A further $37,000 was spent during the city’s own slow role protests last February.
While this was going on, $87,000 was spent on overtime for 6 big occurrences, including 4 homicides and 2 cases of people being barricaded.
And a significant amount, $102,000, was spent by Kingston police on one finished investigation.
Kingston police are preparing for yet another weekend of drinking because Queen’s homecoming is this weekend, thus the year is still not finished.
The first nine months of 2022 saw a deficit for Kingston police.
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