The Lower Mainland’s Transit Police (Hi Chief! Hope your “monitoring” is going well!) have taken to publishing their Freedom of Information responses online. There are four up there now—all from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

The latest was on Transit Police legal fees. Transit Police legal fees by year:

• 2008--$8,287.50
• 2009--$19,335.34
• 2010--$182,088,94
• 2011--$302,314.55
• 2012 (six months in)--$149,421.31

That’s more than 1 per cent of the Transit Police budget—just in fees paid to lawyers. Interestingly, the force has spent nearly $175,000 on lawyers related to Police Act investigations in the past 18 months and more than a quarter million dollars on “indemnification advice” in that year and a half.

This is the fallout from having an expensive police force. If we had Transit Security handling day-to-day operations on SkyTrain, taxpayers would have save the $175,000 in Police Act legal fees, and the indemnification advice category would have been slashed as well.

It also leads to some valid questions:

• What alleged violations of the Police Act have been investigated?
• What is the status of those investigations?
• Have any officers been disciplined for any violations of the Police Act?
• Why is the indemnification amount so high?
• What staff have received indemnity (i.e. had their legal bills paid by taxpayers), and for what purpose?