Alternative response officers become permanent part of Saskatoon Police Service

Special constables that have been patrolling Saskatoon's downtown and Riversdale areas are now a permanent unit within the Saskatoon Police Service.

A motion to that effect was passed Thursday afternoon at the Saskatoon Board of Police Commissioners meeting.

The Alternative Response Unit (ARU) has been a pilot project for the past year. The Alternative Response Officers (AROs) work with vulnerable people and help them connect with support services.

The officers also assist in everything from transporting arrested persons to taking complaints from citizens.

They are unarmed and meant to free up regular police officers to respond to more serious situations.

Insp. Darren Pringle with the Saskatoon Police Service told the board on Thursday that there was some initial concern when things came out that this program was going to be "all enforcement." 

"But we took the position that it was enforcement if necessary, but not necessarily enforcement," he said. "And so that allowed us to try and make linkages for people that we were dealing with, those vulnerable populations on the street."

The board also passed a motion calling for the police service to report back on options and implications for adjusted or extended hours of the program.

Another motion was passed to have the police service continue to make its data and experience available to study  barriers to successful outcomes for individuals the service interacts with — in particular at frontline, including, but not limited to the ARO program.

The ARU was launched in June 2021. A report presented to the board says that in its first year of existence, the officers responded to more than 6,700 lower intensity calls. That included almost 400 outreach calls and 12 calls where they needed to administer naloxone.

"There's 12 people walking around today who wouldn't be alive if the AROs hadn't shown up and administered NARCAN or performed CPR on them until EMS arrived," Pringle said on Thursday.

According to the report submitted to the board, working in collaboration with colleagues from other human service agencies and their regular police officer peers, this new tier of public safety professional "provided a constellation of lower intensity enforcement, administrative, and outreach activities in a cost conscious manner."

When the pilot project was first introduced, the SPS said savings from the project would start slow, but that the officers would eventually cost 10 to 15 per cent less than a regular constable.