Police take data-based approach to crime reduction
SASKATOON The Saskatchewan government has turned to a more data-driven approach to targeted enforcement through changing the mandate of the organized crime-focused combined forces special enforcement unit (CFSEU) to the guns and gangs-focused Crime Reduction Teams (CRT) for municipal police.
The CRT programs in Saskatoon, Regina and Prince Albert are funded by the Ministry of Corrections and Policing. Assistant deputy minister Rob Cameron said last week the teams will have a “strong ” intelligence component.
Data will be used to direct police resources to “where they need to be” to tackle gangs, gang violence, drugs or property crimes, he said. “But that’s one of the strongest parts of this, the ability to leverage and to use the collective intelligence of all the police services that are involved in the program.”
Cameron said intelligence could be gleaned from crime statistics, crime reports or “it could be the contacts of police with the criminal element ... all kinds of different things.”
On Wednesday, Saskatoon police announced its Integrated Crime Reduction Team (I-CRT) will include seven Saskatoon officers and five RCMP members, retaining the same number of officers that were in the CFSEU. Its focus will be on gangs, illegal firearms, drugs (methamphetamine and opioids), vehicle thefts and rural crime.
In a media release, Investigative Support Division Insp. Dale Solie said the “new integrated approach allows us to follow up on that information and be more effective in combating crime as it relates to property, guns and gangs.”
The I-CRT, along with the drug unit, guns and gangs unit and serious assault unit, will fall under the street crime section of the criminal investigations division.
Scott Thompson, a professor and researcher in the University of Saskatchewan’s department of sociology, said as police gathered intelligence to develop criminal informants or have relationships with people in the community in the past, they needed to have back and forth dialogues, ensuring people had a voice in the way communities were policed.
With the shift to stop checks or “dataextraction practices,” that same voice or back and forth was lost, Thomson said. He described the interactions as scripted, since officers have to ask questions to fill certain fields as required, such as driver’s licences and phone numbers.
“It’s not a natural conversation and it’s not a two-way conversation,” Thompson said. “It’s a data-extraction process. I feel for the officers that have to do this on the ground because they, too, their relationship with the community, is also impacted by this push for data.”
The change in mandate to the integrated crime units came on Jan. 1, and saw the CFSEU teams of the province’s three largest police services start to transition to a crime reduction team model similar to the Saskatchewan RCMP’S CRTS, which are also provincially funded.
Cameron said the old mandate was “restrictive” and the ability of the CFSEU to tackle different types of crime was to a degree curtailed. Under the CFSEU mandate, the focus was on organized crime operations.
“Crime is not a stagnant or a static thing; it’s always evolving or always changing,” Cameron said .
“The important thing here is we as both government and law enforcement look at how that’s changing to make sure we adjust to it to be better able to tackle those issues.”