Supervised Consumption Site

By Lara Fominoff

Lethbridge Police “calls for service” statistics don’t tell the whole story according to SCS Executive Director and Mayor

Sep 26, 2019 | 5:36 PM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – The information released by Lethbridge Police at the Wednesday evening Police Commission Meeting is not necessarily a complete picture of what’s going on, according to SCS Executive Director Stacey Bourque and Mayor Chris Spearman.

Bourque has seen the statistics presented which indicate calls at the SCS went from just seven prior to the site’s opening, to 424 in the year after. Calls in the surrounding area went from 289 to 1023.

“The number of calls city-wide, not a lot of actual movement, increasing by .15 per cent or, about one call a week, which to me, is an overwhelming indicator that the SCS hasn’t created any crime, just made it more visible. The other thing that came to mind was that the building that we’re currently in, if you’re looking at “Year Zero” numbers, was actually vacant from the beginning of Aug. 2017 til the point that we opened…So, there wouldn’t have been any calls to that location because there was nobody in the building.”

In addition, she says the nightclub that was located in the building prior was only opened two days a week, so the numbers between Year Zero and Year One are “hardly comparable.”

Bourque adds that according to the Crime Severity Index, while some types of crime have increased as the drug crisis grows, the highest rate of increase occurred between 2014 and 2017.

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Many of the calls in the first year at the SCS also came from staff and were non-urgent in nature.

“From our agency records, 50 per cent of the 424 calls made to the SCS were from ARCHES. And a lot of that has to do with our partnership with the police, the agreements we made prior to opening and our joint policy that we have in place….so call volume does not equate to criminal activity.”

Mayor Chris Spearman also acknowledges that drug-related crime has also gone up in the last several years, but says council approved additional funding for the police service in late 2018 during Operating Budget deliberations so the department could tackle those issues.

“We’ve got the Downtown Policing Unit focusing on the area, and of course additional policing resources where the only thing we funded in our budget that we got approved last November. So, we provided police with additional resources which they’re basically choosing to use to employ peace officers and coordinate The Watch program, so that regular officers can deal with the drug issue in the city.”

In fact, Lethbridge City Council passed a resolution on Aug. 7, 2018, requesting that former Police Chief Rob Davis / the Lethbridge Police Commission come up with and present council with one or several options for an enhanced model of public safety for citizens. Those ideas were presented at the Sept. 10, 2018 CIC (Community Issues Committee) meeting and then referred to budget deliberations in late November 2018.

It’s not clear yet, according to Acting Chief Scott Woods whether or how the new Watch initiative or new CPOs could potentially affect the calls for service in some parts of the city. Woods said that at times, police responses have been affected because officers are dealing with calls in the area surrounding the SCS.

“Quite frankly, we’re in that area more, which means that we’re putting more resources into that area, which means that in other areas of the city for example, or even in that same area of the city, outside it – depending on the priority of what we’re dealing with, our response times will suffer. As a result, we can’t get to some things as quickly as we’d like to. Obviously, we do things on a priority system, so some of the lower level stuff is waiting longer, which is leading to some frustrations from people in the community.”

However, Spearman is not so sure that police response times are even being affected because of additional calls to some parts of the city.

“I don’t think those two things are necessarily related. But certainly, we want to make sure that police response is monitored, and we look at the reason for delayed response and make sure that we do have a clear connection. We’re committing certain resources to the downtown area, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all resources are being dedicated to the downtown area. So, there should be sufficient resources to meet needs in other parts of the city.”

Meantime, Bourque is also questioning the timing of the information being released.

“The information is coming out when we’re in the middle of a (provincial) review for supervised consumption services. So, I think that part is pretty clear. I do think that if we’re going to release data year over year that it be comparable and that we’re using a methodology that is comparing apples to apples.”