Data show police contact interviews on the decline
Under new rules, officers required to file reports on all ‘street checks’
The number of contact interviews conducted by Saskatoon police officers is on the decline, but Chief Troy Cooper says he’s pleased they are still taking place.
“We know that the more you scrutinize someone’s behaviour and activity, the less likely they are to perform that activity,” he told media after this week’s board of police commissioners meeting.
“We didn’t want to completely, I think, eliminate contact interviews. We just wanted them to continue within certain parameters that are acceptable according to our policy, and that’s what we saw.”
Police services across Saskatchewan became subject to rules governing contact interviews — commonly known as street checks — in 2018 amid concerns that the practice was unfairly targeting people based on race and socioeconomic status. The Saskatchewan Police Commission issued a policy stating officers are not to conduct contact interviews on a random or arbitrary basis, or based solely on a person being a member of an identifiable group. Officers are required to report any contact interviews they do to their supervisors and police services report those to the provincial commission each year.
Saskatoon Police Service analysts found city police officers filed more than 40 contact interview reports per month in the first few months after the service’s internal reporting procedures took effect in March 2019. That number was nearly cut in half by the last few months of 2019, to less than 20 reports filed per month.
The decrease in the number of filed reports is attributed to officer training. The analysis found that, in the first few months, officers were reporting interactions that were not contact interviews.
Cooper said it is difficult to compare how the number of contact interviews has changed since the implementation of the provincewide policy because there wasn’t a consistent definition of what a contact interview was before the provincial police commission stepped in. He said it’s also too early to make links between the number of contact interviews and number of incidents police are called to, but is something the service will be able to tell over time.
“What we can say is we think it’s a valuable tool to have police interact with the public as long as they do it in a respectful way so we’ll be able to evaluate and monitor that as we go forward,” he said.