Calgary police chief talks gangs, downtown safety, relationship with the province, protests

Police Chief Mark Neufeld sat down with CTV News Calgary's Jefferson Humphreys to look back at the city police force's 2024, as well as ahead to its 2025.

Topics covered include gang activity in the city, downtown safety, the force's relationship with the province and the handling of an increasing number of protests.

This interview has been edited for length:

Humphreys: I wonder if we can start today with gang activity? ... Has anything significant evolved over 2024 around that?

Neufeld: We've made some good progress here in 2024. We talked last year about the focus around offenders and the fact that we had 1,000 or 1,100 people in Calgary that were involved in the lifestyle ... and the way we were focused on dangerous people, dangerous locations and dangerous activities.

This year, as of today, we're sitting with 69 shootings. ... I think last year when we sat down for this interview, we were at about 95 and we ended the year with 100. So, we're about 27 per cent below, this year, so that's looking really good.

And if you remember the year before, I think, in 2022, we had 127 shootings. So, this is trending in a good way, although the problem is still that we've had 69 shootings.

Even though the number of shootings is down, I think the quality of the arrests and the seizure of crime guns is actually up, and I think that's a reflection of the good work that's being done. ... I'd like to give full credit to the membership for doing the work they've done.

Let's talk downtown safety. ... What kind of progress was made over the year?

I would say it's a bit of a mixed bag with downtown safety. On the positive side, there's been a lot done. There's been lots of investments, lots of interventions into that system.

If I think of this time last year, we were talking about the 50-officer grant that was provided by the provincial government. ... We onboarded those 50 officers and we turned them into what we called community engagement response teams that went into each of the districts to focus specifically on safety in public spaces.

That's all been implemented, although the last four districts would only have gone into effect since September.

The province opened up their navigation centre. ... We have community court. We have the SMART program. ... We've got the opioid dependency program as well.

That has led to a decrease in calls for service from the public.

But the other side of it, I would say, is we still hear from people downtown that they're not feeling safe. The numbers are one thing. The perception of safety is another.

Part of this now is looking to see what's complimentary, what's adding value, what might be at cross-purposes and to continue to adjust in 2025.

What kind of concerns do you have about the relationship with the province going forward?

We've had, historically, a very good relationship with the province. I think the UCP government is very much a law-and-order government, so there's a lot of positive crossover there with public policy pieces that they have that we are in support of.

We though, as the Calgary Police Service and as the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police, work very closely with them to forward their public policy aims. So, we certainly expect that when we have frontline insight into issues such as the efficacy of photo radar and intersection safety devices, we certainly would expect to be asked and we were. We provided the data that we have. ... There was no acknowledgment of the information and then we hear now anecdotal stories when the decision is made about what's going on at some point in time in Hinton.

I don't know that whatever observations were made in places like Hinton or Leduc are generalizable to the third-largest city in the country.

It does (raise concerns about other big-city issues they'll need to work with the province on).

The reality of this sort of thing is we're not happy with the level of engagement, we're not happy with the extent to which our input was considered in this particular case. But we've got a lot of important work to do on a lot of other files, so we'll continue to work with the provincial government. But I certainly hope that's not a sign of things to come in terms of the extent to which they listen to close partners.

The past few years, we have seen highly charged political protests. ... Lots of questions raised around use of force and what constitutes hate speech and those kinds of things. I'm wondering what you learned this year and what you will take into 2025?

These are the types of things that, with the world evolving around geopolitics, we're going to continue to see.

This is a very rapidly evolving environment. We started 2024 dealing primarily with challenges around anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans types of protests, and then that shifted over into an increased number of protests and demonstrations from the pro-Palestinian community and I would say an increase in the level to which those tended to be disruptive to the community, and I think that's where the problem began.

It's a very difficult balance to strike, but it's one that has to be struck by the police, working with the community, making sure that communities are able to, in times like this, get out into the public spaces and to be able to express their Charter rights. But, at the same time, to the extent that those expressions are negatively impacting the community and impacting the Charter rights of the broader community, those are very difficult conversations to be had.

What we found was when groups work with the police—we have protest liaison teams, we have officers assigned to the communities—to the extent to which groups wish to work with the police, a lot of the temperature can be turned down and we can facilitate safe protests. To the extent to which that's not the case, there's more likely to be difficulties and those will result in enforcement and this type of thing.

There's probably lessons to be learned on both sides, and those are lessons that can be carried forward into 2025.