Kelowna, B.C.’s downtown patrol stretched to the limit by shortages
The patrol receives a high volume of calls each day to deal with incidents in alleyways, needle pickups and removing unwanted individuals from businesses. With less staff, wait times have increased.“We’re busier because we’re doing the same number of calls per week with fewer people as we were last year with more. If we’re doing 50 calls in a day with just four people and we were doing 50 calls with six last year,” said Burley.
“We just had our window smashed so having people walk around checking in on the store, checking in on the homeless people, checking in on stores and stuff that are downtown, it’s hugely important to have them. I wish there were more of them,” said Kerri Brandel, manager of Calowna Costume. Brandel says they get visited by the downtown patrol once a week and call them for their services at least once a month.Burley says they are just like any other business dealing with staffing and recruitment issues. They are currently working with the city to secure this year’s funding.
“We always have to be mindful of our budget. The city does give us grants every year that go towards both on-call and the clean team. We work with the city and we have a great relationship with them when we need to increase that,” Burley said.A lot of the officers are overlapping shifts and working overtime to increase the number of members on-call.
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