Despite a little scare last week, the Estevan Police Service is continuing to lobby the provincial government for more police officers.
The provincial government announced Thursday it had approved 30 new police officers for Saskatchewan in 2011. Nine of those officers will be divided evenly among the Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert police services with the remaining 21 to go to rural areas of the province covered by the RCMP.
At first blush, the announcement appeared to be bad news for the City of Estevan, which has been talking to the provincial government about adding two new officers to the local force, as it was not included in the allocation of law enforcement personnel.
However, it has since been learned that last week's announcement covered officers that were funded in the 2010 provincial budget and the City's hopes of getting new cops in 2011 are still alive.
EPS Chief Del Block said he has held discussions with the provincial government and remains hopeful he will get both the officers he asked for. He added that two more officers would be very important to the EPS which has been forced to deal with a significant increase in its workload over the past couple of years.
"The local (police) boards are expected to maintain an adequate number of police officers to police," Block said. "The government positions are meant to be over and above, you cannot cut positions and then backfill with government positions.
"They are to enhance the policing and they go into specialized positions."
Block said the EPS presently has three government-funded positions; namely the court security officer/school resource officer, major crimes investigator and what is called a community enhanced position.
"We have the latitude of moving them around to where we can best use them and right at the moment I have the community enhanced position also working in a plain clothes position in drug investigation," Block said.
"(The government positions) would go into plain clothes, but we would also like to have the traffic section reincorporated."
