Brad Bradford pledges to add 1,000 frontline Toronto cops if elected mayor

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Brad Bradford made a pledge to the people of Toronto while on the campaign trail Saturday.

“We’re not putting a man on the moon,” Bradford said. “We’re putting police officers on the streets.”

The mayoral candidate said he would hire 1,000 new police officers by the end of his first term in office. To get that promise fulfilled, Bradford proposed opening a satellite campus of the Ontario Police College at the Toronto Police College in Etobicoke.

The announcement comes less than two weeks before residents of the city head to the voting booth on Oct. 26.

Bradford said Toronto Police recruits must train at the provincial police college in Aylmer, Ont., thereby limiting the number of recruits the city can send. If he wins the top political seat in the city, he pledges to secure more seats for Toronto’s recruits at the provincial site. He also proposed training additional city recruits at the Etobicoke-based college, thereby helping train additional candidates.

Mass hiring done back in the 1980s

Bradford said this type of mass hiring was done back in the 1980s at Charles O. Bick College in Scarborough.

“Mayor Chow says the city can’t train more officers,” Bradford said. “The training pipeline reflects her ambition, not Toronto’s limit. Change the ambition and you change the pipeline. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Dr. Gary Ellis, a former superintendent of the Toronto Police Services, said the city must be ambitious in its pursuit to hire qualified police officers in the most efficient manner possible.

“Toronto needs 1,000 additional frontline officers, and we should be ambitious about how quickly we can get them onto our streets,” Ellis said. “When people need a police officer, they want one there quickly. More frontline officers mean better response times and safer communities.”

Re-open 54 Division

The incumbent was asked about Bradford’s plan to supply more qualified officers as efficiently as possible. But she dismissed his proposal saying, “He probably doesn’t read the budget.”

“I should not laugh too hard,” Chow told reporters Saturday. “He would have known on safety, under my watch, we have hired more than a thousand police officers and mental health crisis workers. That’s how you keep people safe. It’s not just about hiring police officers, which we have done, but it’s also about the mental health crisis workers.”

As part of her plan for community safety initiatives, the Mayor wants to maintain or improve 911 wait times. Chow claims wait times have improved “90% during (her) time as mayor.”

CBC reported earlier this year that 911 wait times were three seconds.

Chow also pledged to re-open 54 Division as a standalone police station by 2030. The station merged into 55 Division in 2018, as part of a modernization and cost-saving restructuring plan.

“A city that is not safe is not free,” said Bradford. “Toronto isn’t broken. It’s stuck. Change is within our grasp. But to change the city we need to change the mayor.”

According to the Bradford campaign, his plan would cost approximately $143 million annually once fully implemented in the fourth year of his term.

ganderson@postmedia.com

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