CALGARY -- Around 30 tickets and five criminal charges were handed out at weekend rallies against COVID-19 health restrictions, Calgary police Chief Mark Neufeld said during an update Monday.
Neufeld said officers have been gathering information at the numerous rallies that have been held weekly in recent months, rather than actively ticketing people for not following health restrictions, but Saturday's event was a little different, prompting a different response.
"A lot of times because the gatherings involve a lot of people and it can be a fairly dynamic situation, we tend not to go in the middle of that, and the challenges of doing that were underscored on Saturday," he said.
"We saw toward the end of the event, officers were dealing with a couple individuals who they were going to ticket and we saw a large group of people go over and crowd into that space and begin to interfere with the officers as they did that."
Police also arrested 21-year-old Ocean Wiesblatt at a pick-up game of hockey on Saturday for obstructing an officer and resisting arrest, with video of that incident being shared widely on social media. Police said Wiesblatt refused to comply with the officers' demands and refused to identify himself, but Wiesblatt maintained after he did nothing wrong.
Alberta's Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw was asked during Monday's regular COVID-19 update about that incident and seeming mixed messages being sent around outdoor activities. She said hockey games are not allowed under the current rules as there is no way to maintain proper distance.
Hinshaw has earlier said Albertans are allowed to exercise and go for walks or go skating in small groups, provided they are moving and keep distance.
Calgary police have received about 500 calls from Calgarians reporting people breaking the current heath restrictions — indoor and outdoor gatherings are banned, restaurants and bars are take-out only and retail businesses are reduced to 15 per cent capacity.
Neufeld encouraged Calgarians to call and report obviously bad behaviour, but said not everything needs to result in a call to police.
"One of the challenges with these types of reports is that we're balancing the response to public health infractions along with other types of calls police would conventionally attend," he said.
"So it's one of these situations where the nature of the offence is such that we have to find people committing the offence, so if we get there too far after the fact ... there's really little we can do."
The province announced 1,240 new cases of COVID-19 and nine more deaths Monday afternoon and said the positivity rate is at 6.8 per cent after Alberta Health Services conducted 18,306 tests on Sunday.
The R-value for the province is 0.92, while Edmonton and Calgary’s are 0.89 and 0.97, respective, Hinshaw said.
