Public safety and policing

The cheapest crime prevention is a city that is walkable, lively, and worth being in. Empty streets are not safe streets. Saint John spends $32M on police and another $780K a year on private security; that money could expand the Mobile Crisis Response Team, supportive housing, or community programming that actually moves the needle.

Where I stand

Jane Jacobs wrote it in 1961, and decades of research have confirmed it: streets with more pedestrians, shopkeepers, and people on stoops have less crime, even after controlling for income and demographics. Community presence does more than enforcement ever will. The cheapest crime prevention is a city that is walkable, lively, and worth being in.

Lighting is the cheapest lever in that toolkit, and one Saint John under-invests in, and in places fails to maintain. A well-lit street feels safer, is safer (the “eyes on the street” need eyes that can actually see), and pulls people back into using it after dark. LED conversion on the main roads has helped. Pedestrian-scale lighting on the side streets, in the parks, and along the routes between bus stops and front doors has not kept pace.

Saint John spends roughly $32 million a year on police and another $780,000 a year on private security to make Uptown feel safer. If that money were redirected, you could take every long-term homeless person in Saint John out for coffee and a doughnut at Tim’s every single morning. Or it could expand the Mobile Crisis Response Team, the joint Horizon-Saint John Police unit that pairs a nurse with a plain-clothes officer for mental health calls that do not actually need a five-person fire crew. Or, if we could save 10% on policing alone, it could build twenty-two new supportive housing units every year. A small example of the same kind of mismatch: the contract has the guards driving pickup trucks. That is not a patrol vehicle. It is designed to isolate the driver from the outside. It is also expensive to maintain and hard to manoeuvre. And it doesn’t project the welcoming image a small electric car would. This is the inefficiency I want to fix: paying for the wrong tool to do the job.

I will not default to throwing more money at policing as the answer to petty crime. The lever that actually moves the needle is the one that runs through everything else on this platform: walkable streets, third places, mixed neighbourhoods, supportive housing.

I also want to look at how the city dispatches emergency calls. Firefighters trained as medical responders are good. But it also means crews get tied up on low-acuity calls when a tanker should be staffed and ready. The right tool to the right call is a procedural fix, not a budget fight, and I will bring the question to council as an open agenda item.

On who supervises the police. Saint John already has a Board of Police Commissioners, a structure that I find reassuring. Having police under council creates a temptation to use the executive branch to make life for legislature easier, especially around elections. I would keep the two branches separate. What needs work is transparency: meeting agendas and minutes posted on a predictable schedule, regular public reports on calls, complaints, use of force, and budget, real public-comment time at meetings. And plain-language explanations of policy changes when they happen. The Board’s job is to be accountable to the public, and the public has to be able to see what it does for that to be true. The reforms beyond municipal authority (composition, civilian review under the NB Police Act) are worth advocating for, but the city does not need to wait on the province to start showing its work.

What I will push for on council

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