‘Challenge before us:’ Police chief responds to S’toon crime stats

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Compared to other cities in Canada, the 2023 Crime Severity Index had a bit of good news for Saskatoon:

The city is now ranked eighth in the country for crime severity, improving from sixth in 2022.

But Saskatoon police chief Cameron McBride says the statistics also point to some concerning trends and a “challenge before us” as a city.

The crime severity in Saskatoon rose slightly in 2023, and that movement was driven mostly by violent crime.

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McBride says this reflects trends other police departments are noticing across the country.

“I have the benefit of communicating with chiefs from all across Canada, and … I can tell you that Saskatoon’s struggles are not in isolation,” McBride said. “We’re not unique. We see all the same struggles happening across Canada.”

Front-line police officers in Saskatoon have been saying the same thing, McBride added.

“There seems to be a high propensity to use violence on the streets,” he said, noting that officers are also seeing more weapons used in these types of violent crimes as well.

Using data like the Crime Severity Index, that measures changes in the type and frequency of crimes across Canada from year to year, McBride says the Saskatoon Police can prioritize their time and efforts where they’re needed most.

Now, he says the force’s “focus, moving forward” will be on “what we can do to shift and address violent crime in our community” — even when that means temporarily moving officers into different jobs.

“Some of the initiatives that we’re thinking about doing requires us to draw resources from throughout the service,” he said. “They’re not things we can sustain over a long period of time, but we can draw resources and focus our efforts on the type of projects that make an impact, and disrupt patterns that we see in the community that are hurting us as a city.”

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Mostly, those officers are coming from the police force’s investigative units. If they were working on investigations where the police had “the benefit of time in our favour,” McBride said, he is asking them to temporarily shelve that work and take up a different mantle.

This year, McBride says one of the Saskatoon Police’s top priorities will be finding and arresting people who are already wanted on serious charges.

This was one of the key topics raised during the inquests into the 2022 Saskatchewan mass stabbing attacks.

After the attacks, it came to light that Myles Sanderson had been in living in Saskatoon in the days and weeks before the tragedy, with a warrant out for his arrest.

“Out of the James Smith inquiry, one of the things that was made very clear is that there needs to be focused efforts towards warrant enforcement,” he said. “So … we’re focusing on some of the existing warrants that we have right now; warrants that mean that we have violent individuals in our community who are wanted, and who should be in court or on remand.”

Though McBride acknowledges that Saskatoon’s year-over-year statistics are “trending in the wrong direction,” he said it’s important for Saskatonians to know that the actual change in the number and type of crimes is very small, and people don’t need to be alarmed.

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“Definitely, any rise in the number of violent crimes is of concern to me (but) the community should not look at crime severity and say ‘we’ve trended in the wrong direction, therefore I need to be afraid.’ That is not the case,” he said.

“As police service, we need to understand how people are feeling, and how we can address their feeling of being safe as well as their real safety — they’re both equally important.”

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