LPS opens doors to new headquarters
$27.9M renovation, expansion completed
There’s more than meets the eye at Lethbridge Police Service headquarters. Most visitors only get a glimpse of the front office, unless they’ve broken the law. But with a $27.9-million renovation and expansion now complete, Lethbridge police were eager to show off their new digs.
They opened the doors to guided public tours on Thursday. It was a rare chance for the public to see what really goes on behind the doors of the Lethbridge police station.
Construction on the facility began in the spring of 2014. It includes a 3,500-square-metre expansion on the north side of the station and a large renovation to the existing facility.
There is a new three-level addition at the rear of the existing building and a two-level parking structure, partially underground, which will increase parking capacity for operational and staff vehicles from 167 spaces to approximately 300.
The City predicts that the expansion will extend the life of the facility by 25 years. It currently houses 243 staff, as well as nearly 60 volunteers.
“The original building was built in 1996. We outgrew it quite a while before the addition was able to be completed,” said Inspector Tom Ascroft. “The building was showing its age at the time, now everything has been refreshed. It’s just generally a very nice building that’s way more suited to our operations nowadays.”
Officers now have extensive classroom and meeting space, as well as a new fitness facility. They also have a “combatives room,” where officers can practise hand-tohand combat, use practice Tasers and guns or try computer simulation exercises. In the past, officers had to go offsite.
“With use-of-force equipment, we’re required to have a significant amount of training and qualification with batons and OC Spray and stuff like that,” said Ascroft. “We now have a combatives room with mats and everything ... It reduces the amount of time (officers) are off the street because they can just schedule and pop in here.”
The renovations also allowed for an expansion of the cell block. It went from eight cells to 28, and Ascroft said it is “full quite a bit.”
Ascroft said they were happy to show off the facility to the public, but it was also a delicate balance to preserve policing practices.
“We’re all about wanting people to know what we do and what’s going on at a certain level, and we’re happy to show off some of our stuff,” he said. “You want to be transparent and you want people to see what they paid for. This was a lot of money and we do appreciate that we’re benefitting from this great facility. But the other thing is there are some parts of policing that are not intended for everybody to know. So we have to balance that and I think we’ve done that.”
Members of city council, the Police Commission and veterans of the force all had the chance to take a tour as well.
Some of the areas that were not open to the public could be viewed via video, such as the holding cells. There were also displays of equipment such as traffic or tactical gear, and the chance to ask questions of officers.
Ascroft said it was good to have all the departments together under one roof again. Over the past three years, they’ve had to shuffle around a bit.
“For our members and the public and our partners and people that use the building, it was exasperating at times,” said Ascroft. “It’s just like if anybody’s ever built or renovated a house and lived in it at the same time. That’s kind of what happened here but on a much bigger scale.”
But he said the staff was “great” and there weren’t too many issues with the public “considering we had to move a lot of people to a lot of different sites.”
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