Calgary police chief talks gangs, downtown security,provincial relations and protests
download (42).jpeg
Police Chief Mark Neufeld spoke with CTV News Calgary's Jefferson Humphreys to look at the city's 2024 police year, as well as its outlook for 2025.
Police Chief Mark Neufeld spoke with CTV News Calgary's Jefferson Humphreys to look at the city's 2024 police year, as well as its outlook for 2025.
Topics covered included gang activity in the city, downtown security, police relations with the province and dealing with a growing number of protests.
Humphreys: I wonder if we can start with gang activity today? ... Has anything significant changed in 2024 on this issue?
The University of Calgary responded with restraint to the Gaza protests in May, the report says
Neufeld: We made good progress here in 2024. We talked last year about the focus on offenders and the fact that we had 1,000 or 1,100 people in Calgary who were involved in this way of life. Dangerous places and dangerous activities.
This year so far we have dealt with 69 shootings. ...I think last year when we sat down for this interview we were about 95 and we ended the year at 100. So we're down about 27% this year so that's looking pretty good.
And if you remember last year, I think in 2022 we had 127 shootings. So that's a positive trend, although the problem is we had 69 shootings. Even though the number of guns has gone down, I think the quality of arrests and the seizure of weapons used in crimes has gone up, and I think that reflects the good work that is being done. ...I want to fully congratulate the members on the work that they have done.
We are talking about inner-city safety. ... What progress has been made during the year?
I would say it's a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to downtown security. On the positive side, a lot has been done. There's been a lot of investment, a lot of interventions in this system.
If I think back to this time last year, there was talk of the 50-person grant that was given by the provincial government. ... We took those 50 officers and turned them into what we call community engagement response teams that went into each of the districts to specifically focus on safety in public spaces.
All of this has been implemented, although the final four districts won't be implemented until September.
The province has opened its navigation center. ... We have a community court. We have the SMART program. ...We also have the Opioid Addiction Program.
This has resulted in fewer calls for service from the public. But the other side of the story is that people in the city center continue to say they don't feel safe. Numbers are one thing. Perception of safety is another.
Now it's about looking at what's complementary, what adds value, what might be contradictory and continuing to adapt in 2025.
What are your concerns about relations with the province going forward? We have always had a very good relationship with the province. I think the UCP government is a very law and order government, so it has a lot of positive common ground with the public policies that they have adopted and that we support.
We, the Calgary Police Service and the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police, work closely with them to advance their public policy goals. So we certainly expect that when we have front-line information on issues like the effectiveness of photo radar and intersection safety devices, we will be asked, and we have been. We have provided the information that we have. ... There was no acknowledgement of the information and now we hear anecdotes when the decision is made as to what is happening at any given time in Hinton.
I don't know if the observations made in places like Hinton or Leduc are generalizable to the third largest city in the country.
That raises concerns about other issues that big cities have to work with the province.
The reality of these kinds of things is that we are not happy with the level of engagement, we are not happy with the extent to which our input has been taken into account in this particular case. But we have a lot of important work to do on a lot of other issues, so we will continue to work with the provincial government. But I certainly hope that this is not a harbinger of things to come in terms of the extent to which they feel their partners are close.
We have seen some very lively political demonstrations in recent years. ... A lot of questions have been raised about the use of force and what constitutes hate speech and things like that. I wonder what you learned this year and what you'll get in 2025?
These are the kinds of things we're going to continue to see as the world evolves around geopolitics.
This is a very fast-changing environment. We started 2024 primarily facing challenges related to anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans protests and then that turned into an increased number of protests and demonstrations from the pro-Palestinian community and I would say an increased level of this divides the community. , and I think that's where the problem starts.
It's a very difficult balance to strike, but it's one that has to be struck by the police, working with the community, making sure that communities are able to, in times like this, get out into the public spaces and to be able to express their Charter rights. But, at the same time, to the extent that those expressions are negatively impacting the community and impacting the Charter rights of the broader community, those are very difficult conversations to be had.
What we found was when groups work with the police—we have protest liaison teams, we have officers assigned to the communities—to the extent to which groups wish to work with the police, a lot of the temperature can be turned down and we can facilitate safe protests. To the extent to which that's not the case, there's more likely to be difficulties and those will result in enforcement and this type of thing.
There's probably lessons to be learned on both sides, and those are lessons that can be carried forward into 2025.
[attachment deleted by admin]