Saskatoon police seeing huge uptick in calls

The Saskatoon Police Service (SPS) is finding this year to be much busier than last.

“We’re starting to see things are getting busy for police again,” Chief Troy Cooper told Gormley on Tuesday. “Because of the  (COVID-19) restrictions that people were under for several years now, as people get to interact with each other again, we’re starting to get more calls for service.”

Cooper said the SPS has received around 4,000 more calls at this point in the year compared to 2021.

Despite the uptick, it doesn’t mean there have been more arrests made.

“Our arrests are really not up an awful lot. We’re seeing about 300 or 400 more arrests this year than last year at this time,” Cooper claimed.

“The additional calls we’re seeing are generally for small, more minor criminal offences, but also a ton of additional social issues with things related to addictions and mental health.”

The increase in calls has prompted the SPS to re-evaluate how it serves the community.

“We have been developing the alternate response officers, so they have training in homelessness (and) they have training in how to deal with mental health, but they do have authority to enforce when required …,” Cooper said.

“We would have about five or six of those officers. It’s a pilot program, but because some of them are moving on into policing careers, we’ve added additional staff. So over the course of the summer, there’s 10 officers or so deployed in the downtown and Riversdale areas.”

Cooper says violent assaults have also seen a slight rise in the city, as well as vehicle thefts.

“So far this year, we’ve had 337 vehicles stolen in Saskatoon alone. That’s up significantly over last year,” he said. “It’s a real concern because of course, when we try and make arrests related to stolen vehicles, often it results in an evade-police incident, which is extremely dangerous for the officers, the people involved and also for the community.”

Moving forward, Cooper says there needs to be a community approach in tackling some certain issues inside the city.

“We have to address homelessness, mental health and addictions as a community,” he said. “But how do we do it in a way that has the least amount of impact in other areas? That’s I think the biggest challenge we have.

“Because some of our challenges are clustered around the social service providers, we are present there more often and so we’re able to take the same number of resources and focus them a little bit more.”