Police chief Troy Cooper speaks out on jail violence, gangs and record 2019 homicides

There is no sign of a gang war in Saskatoon, despite gang activity being a factor in some of this year's record 11 homicides, police Chief Troy Cooper says.

"Some of the homicides are involving gang members," Cooper told CBC News Wednesday. "But certainly we have no indication that there is a war or any sort of prolonged violent actions between gangs going on right now."

Cooper's comments come a week after Saskatchewan's Ministry of Justice took the rare step of publicly naming two rival gangs whose tensions caused a recent lockdown at Saskatoon Correctional Centre. An 18-year-old inmate was stabbed and seriously injured, though justice officials did not link that stabbing to the gang dispute. 

Cooper said what's happening between gangs behind bars isn't necessarily spilling out onto Saskatoon's streets.

"It's different than what we see when people are not in custody," he said. "There's more structure. There's more gang involvement inside the correctional centre than there is when people are out. And so we don't always see what's happening inside reflected on the street."

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Gang members are more likely than other people to carry firearms in public and use them spontaneously, Cooper said. 

But fewer than half of this year's 11 homicides involved guns, he said.

A 'very taxing' summer

Cooper has previously said that despite gang and drug elements in some of the homicide cases, there is no overall pattern to this year's deaths, nor are they random acts of violence.

The locations of the homicides have included apartments, houses, backyards, alleyways and sidewalks.

Staff Sgt. Blair Pellerin, who heads the force's major crimes unit, recently told CBC News it's been a "very taxing" summer for his team.

"[That's] due to us having had seven homicides under a three-month window and during the summer season where all of us would like to have some holiday time away from work to have a home life with our families," Pellerin said via email.

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Major crimes currently has eight full-time detectives investigating this year's homicides. Seven of the 11 investigations are "closed", with suspects (ranging in age from 15 to 37) charged in connection with those deaths. 

But Cooper said that if the homicide tally continues to climb, "We'd have to look at restructuring the service to make sure that they have more permanent staff there."

When needed, the eight full-time homicide investigators are helped out by a number of temporarily reassigned officers. Injured officers, for instance, sometimes help scan CCTV footage. And the force has a cadre of more than 60 experienced detectives to draw from, Cooper said. 

But doing so always risks pulling officers away from equally important tasks. Fraud and sexual offences are also on the rise, Cooper said. 

"There are only so many buns in the basket," as Pellerin put it. "If you take from one area to gain, you lose in that area you picked from."

Previous internal audits have found that the Saskatoon Police Service is short of officers compared to police forces in other cities such as Winnipeg.

A police tweet from earlier this week gave a sense of how overtasked the Saskatoon service can be on some days.

"[It] equates… to us being 39 officers short if you use Winnipeg staffing levels," said Dean Pringle, president of the Saskatoon Police Association.   

Cooper said there are plans to ask for more officers in next year's budget, including a tech person who will take over the duty of collecting camera footage that sometimes falls on patrol officers. That will allow patrol members to remain dedicated to street, he said.