While Calgary public safety has been in the spotlight now for a couple of years, Calgary police Chief Constable Mark Neufeld said that he’s “super optimistic” about what’s ahead.
Chief Neufeld sat down for a year-end interview with LWC Dec. 18, and looked back on a year where the Calgary Police Service (CPS) had its challenges but showed real signs of progress in curbing crime in the city.
The Chief said that while public awareness of crime was high due to ongoing pandemic-related public safety issues, then amplified by being top of mind during the 2023 provincial election, shootings are down more than 25 per cent. Property crime is also down in 2023, he said.
He did say that violent crime, driven by street robberies and common assaults, is up about 13 per cent. The good news is those crimes are happening in specific locations, Chief Neufeld said.
“So, we sort of know what’s driving that… some of it is in public spaces on transit as well. I think we’ve made some strides,” he said.
“This past year we heard loud and clear from Calgarians that they were not feeling safe and comfortable on transit.”
Chief Neufeld said the issue is broader than just transit properties themselves; he said they prefer to frame it in terms of public spaces. As they intervene in the system, displacement occurs, and people move up and down the transit system. Unhoused Calgarians moved into these areas near transit during the pandemic because there was wifi, plug-ins, warmth and then as they congregated, social services – including food and other supplies – were being delivered to these areas, the Chief said.
“Pretty soon, people didn’t even have to come back down to the sort of agencies that serve the vulnerable population for a bowl of soup or whatever,” Chief Neufeld said.
“Food and other supplies were being actually delivered down the line, so people didn’t have to, actually… they got more, I think probably more settled in in other areas of town than they had been in the past.”
Interagency cooperation has helped
Deployments like Operation Crest with the Alberta Sheriffs, or the overlapping activities with Calgary Transit, Calgary Bylaw, EMS and other agencies, have helped them begin to understand what’s happening in and around public transit. It’s allowed them to look closer at data and identify “high-system users.” These are folks where interactions are regularly recorded between the different agencies along the Calgary transit lines.
“I think, when we think about safety on transit or public spaces, we think about quality of life, we think about the crime that exists, we think about disorder, how that makes people feel,” he said.
“Some of the issues that I think jumped out front and center were homelessness, addictions and mental health. Once we sort of understand why people are in those spaces, you have a better chance of sort of bringing to bear or connecting them to resources that will actually be meaningful for them.”
Another big help this year in handling some of the calls that don’t require uniformed police intervention is the 911/211 call diversion program, Chief Neufeld said. That program was designed for 911 operators to triage and assign non-emergency or non-safety-related calls to social agency teams better equipped to handle them.
“We’ve been able to divert about 30,000 calls in the last year, which is a significant number,” Chief Neufeld said.
Additional members will offer some relief, says Chief
Workload was identified as a major concern for CPS members in the recent employee satisfaction survey. Most of the surveyed members did not agree that CPS was adequately staffed.
While the CPS budget does allow for the hiring of more officers over the next four years, Chief Neufeld said the province’s contribution towards 50 officers for 2024 will provide further relief.
Still, he said keeping it in perspective along with Calgary’s growth is important. Tens of thousands of people are expected to come to Calgary, not just from other parts of Canada, but from around the world,” Chief Neufeld said.
“It’s not just a question of numbers, straight numbers of people that are coming. It’s who’s coming,” he said.
“Depending on who’s coming, they may need more or less from the police than just people migrating from Ontario or BC or whatever, coming for professional jobs. As newcomer communities come and settle into Calgary, oftentimes, they will need a little bit more services from police and other services than other communities, and that’s understandable.”
They’re keeping a close eye on where they’re seeing growth nodes across the City of Calgary – including in the downtown. As the City continues to press forward with plans to create a greater residential presence, Neufeld said there’s going to be an emphasis on public safety. That may include a downtown CPS station location, he said.
What may not be sustainable moving forward is the number of resources it takes to maintain public safety at ongoing protests in Calgary, Chief Neufeld said. It’s incredibly taxing as the protests have increased in frequency and complexity. It’s evolved quite a bit since pre-COVID-19 protests, he said.
He said protests have shifted to groups that aren’t always willing to work with police to protest democratically or peacefully, and to those wanting to be more disruptive to the community.
“That’s not something we’d seen before,” he said.
There’s a growing emotional component to protests in Calgary, especially with a geopolitical component to them. That’s oftentimes led to counterprotests.
“These come with a lot of emotion. Understandably, both communities are in pain and wanting to get out and get their message out,” he said.
“But at the same time, these are in close proximity to roadways, you’ve got a counter-protest, you’ve got some fringe groups here that would like to get at one another. They’re focused more on one another than they are on the message.”
These situations often require front-line officers trained in protest management. Chief Neufeld said that officers have to either be called in from their days off to help, or the resources are being pulled from other areas of the city resulting in “a degradation of services to Calgarians on the weekend when there’s emergencies going on.”
Chief Neufeld said they continue to work with other cities to explore models for protest policing moving forward.
Data a bigger part of Calgary police
Chief Neufeld is a big believer in data in policing. He took his master’s degree at Cambridge in evidence-based policing. He said the data clearly shows that crime isn’t evenly spread across a city like Calgary.
It would be difficult to deal with crime in a city with a vast geographical footprint like Calgary if that were the case, he said.
“Luckily, we don’t need to be. If we actually look at like things like violence and stuff like that are very sticky, and they actually concentrated in smaller areas,” he said.
“If we understand where that’s happening, we don’t have to be everywhere at one time. We just have to be in places where it’s concentrating to have the best effect.”
When Chief Neufeld arrived at CPS in 2019, he said data quality wasn’t where it should be. He said it wasn’t timely enough. To make better decisions around policing with the available resources, he said they needed higher-quality data.
“I think policing data across the board, everybody’s recognizing how much more they could do if they had better quality data,” he said.
“So, we’ve worked really hard on that.”
Officers now have app dashboards for their phones where they can quickly access information when they have an interaction with a person. It informs the decisions they make on the fly, he said.
Chief Neufeld said that one side of data is using it to inform decisions on the fly. The other is tapping into the data and using it for predictive analytics using artificial intelligence. They’ve struck a technology ethics committee to dig further into some of the ethical use of police data to not target segments of the population, or govern areas like facial recognition.
High systems users in 2024
A big focus for 2024 will be using some of the data to track interactions with high system users. Chief Neufeld has spoken at length during city council meetings and at the police commission, referring to these folks who have multiple contacts with policing and other agencies.
They’ve been arrested, or charged, referred to social services, transported to another location, or created some level of public disorder – but have been consistently returned to the street.
LWC asked Chief Neufeld where the failures are in working with these citizens – is it social services, is it with police or is it the justice system?
He said it wasn’t necessarily failures in the system.
“I just don’t know that we’ve had the level of integration that we have now, or that we’re moving towards,” he said.
In the past, they’ve all had siloed approaches to these people. He said the CPS would take a criminal justice approach, “where we end up going in and just hammering everybody,” he said. It turns out, that’s not a great tactic, he said, as you simply trap people with other vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system.
There is a role for police in these situations, Chief Neufeld said, despite what some believe. Officers are often on the front lines interacting with vulnerable Calgarians in difficult positions. He said it’s further integration with the health system to incentivize people toward accepting help. The incentivization comes in the form of consequences, Chief Neufeld said.
“The role of police is to make sure that this infrastructure that was built for the use of all Calgarians and visitors to the city gets used for the intended purpose, and it doesn’t turn into a consumption site for drugs or a de facto homeless shelter because somebody wants to stay there for the day,” he said.
That’s where greater integration of police and health will help, he said.
“If there’s no incident, police aren’t going to be the be the sole answer to that. The health system’s probably not going to be the sole answer to that,” he said.
“Working together, we’re probably going to be able to incent – pull and push – them out of that life and pull them into an alternative reality, hopefully. That’s something that I think we’ll see continued to be built upon in 2024.”
