With Black Lives Matter activism a major topic in 2020, Police Chief Troy Cooper says their initial response to what they had heard was to listen.
Cooper says it was important to hear what was happening globally but they needed to know what it meant to people in Saskatoon. He says people regardless of their background or community that the police response includes them.
“We heard that people would like to have respectful interactions with the police, we heard that a trusted mechanism for police oversight was important, and we heard that training was really critical, training for police officers to begin to understand and know their community.” Cooper says he heard that people wanted to see police rethink 911, and that responses around mental health and addictions look different than just always sending police. He suggests some of the things they will work on this year are structural changes for diversity, equity and inclusion, communication regarding a national framework for de-escalation , expanding their relationship with the office of the Treaty Commissioner and increasing the use of police officers at community meetings, so officers can learn and hear from their communities.

New Technology in 2021

By the end of 2021 Saskatoon Police are hoping to have 25 officers with body worn cameras.
Police Chief Troy Cooper says body worn cameras are a great example of a way to build community trust, if done right. “Our officers would like to see it because it provides a different perspective of an interaction and the community would like to see it because it provides the best evidence or more evidence of what actually occurred .” Cooper says the pilot project is a for the cameras is a large one that will occur over the next few years.
Currently Saskatoon Police have begun community consultation and policy development for the program, then appropriate software will be developed to store the data the cameras upload.
He adds the storage cost is one of the bigger portions of the program. Cooper says they will expense about $490,000 this year, that will go towards those software and hardware needs and to re-align or add staff I.T purposes.

Harm Reduction in 2021

Since 2013 Saskatoon has been impacted by crystal meth and the opioid crisis, and harm reduction was a discussion that was very much alive in 2020 for the Saskatoon Police.
Police Chief Troy Cooper says that enforcement alone has been ineffective in regards to people are using drugs, and police have had to partner with local and provincial health partners to develop strategies around this.
“The enforcement that we do has to be focused on people who bring drugs to the community, bring illicit drugs to Saskatchewan and Saskatoon, the drug traffickers, people who are preying on the most vulnerable in the community. And lessen our focus on people who are impacted in a health way, people who are addicted to the drugs.”

Cooper says other pillars the police support are education, prevention, treatment and harm reduction.
He says officers administered Naloxone to someone who was overdosing 34 times in 2020. Cooper states their role with the safe consumption site in 2021 will be to stop people from praying on those who use it, and to make sure there is no degradation in that neighbourhood.