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Keeping residents safe while continuing to crack down on meth, dealing with the challenges of a growing city, hosting a major sporting event and planning for the future will be the focus for the Regina Police Service in 2020.
Work has already begun to prepare for the Grey Cup, to be hosted by the Saskatchewan Roughriders in November.
Chief Evan Bray said the Grey Cup is much more than a single game. It’s a week-long celebration in which police must be prepared to handle an influx of thousands of people from a crowd management standpoint, while also maintaining public safety across the city.
“It’s quite impressive, the amount of work that has to go on behind the scenes to get ready for Grey Cup,” Bray said.
While Saskatchewan last hosted the Grey Cup in 2013, Bray explained a lot has changed since then. He pointed to the 2017 stabbing and vehicle-ramming attack in Edmonton that injured a police officer outside an Edmonton Eskimos game.
“That changed the way the CFL looks at security. That changed the way that we deploy officers to just regular-season Rider games and so a Grey Cup game has all of that built into the discussion,” said Bray.
The Regina Police Service has received $600,000 in funding from the city, built into its 2020 budget to go towards Grey Cup special duty assignments and equipment expenses.
The budget also included funding for four additional police constables in 2020, to be assigned to the front line.
“I think they’ll likely be patrol officers,” Bray said. “That’s where we see a great need, although there are needs in lots of different places in our organization. The community wants to see police officers in their area. They want to see swift response times.”
Bray said the cop-to-population ratio — the number of officers per 100,000 people — is down by 20 officers over the last 10 to 15 years.
“That speaks really to how rapidly our city has grown. Nothing else. We just haven’t grown our police service at the same rate the city has grown,” said Bray.
Work will also continue in 2020 to put a plan together on what the new headquarters building will look like at the site of the former Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) bus depot located across the street from the current police HQ.
Work needs to be done inside the STC building and some employees in off-site locations will be moving in. Bray said renovations will be done in the current headquarters along with a structure connecting the two buildings.
“Start to finish, it’s about a 2 1/2-year project,” Bray said. “However I think you will start to see some of this develop through 2020 for sure.”
Just like in 2019, Bray anticipates drugs, guns and gangs to once again be the biggest challenges of the new year.
Bray said some officers funded by the provincial government will be redeployed to the crime response team, focusing on more serious crimes like firearms offences.
As he flips the pages of the calendar to a new year, Bray’s resolution is to improve the communication within the police service.
“We have some serious expectations that are put on our police service to perform in our community on a daily basis. We need to make sure that all of our values and our strategic goals and direction is communicated throughout everybody in the organization and we’re able to hear their concerns coming back to us,” said Bray.
Police conducted a survey recently which found one of the things members crave is constant communication up and down the chain of command. Bray said that builds understanding, collaboration and a more respectful workplace.
— With files from 980 CJME’s Lisa Schick
