New Alberta plan pairs peace officers with local police to address drug crisis

About 800 peace officers working in 34 large and mid-sized cities across Alberta will be co-ordinating with local police agencies and sharing data, as part of a new plan for addressing the fentanyl crisis in the province.

Alberta's Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services Mike Ellis announced the plan Wednesday. He said that right now, there are various levels of co-ordination between peace and police officers, but the initiative will bring everyone more in line. 

"[It] provides a strategic plan, an efficiency to make sure that we are dealing with any social and civil disorder problem in an effective way," Ellis said.

Peace officers aren't being granted additional powers but may attend calls with police officers. 

Warren Driechel, one of the interim Edmonton police chiefs, said that the various organizations involved are now under a singular command system, led by police.

"We're including key city personnel in those things such as operations and planning. So they don't fall directly all the time under police control or command. It is a collaborative approach," he said at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon.

"We're going to do it in month[-long] sprints where we're working together. We put all those decision-makers in one room together to deal with those deployments. It allows us to make decisions on the fly."

The initiative will also allow agencies to share data, so that "problem locations" can be more easily pinpointed, he said.

"We've done a lot of work with our data and we could tell you without a doubt that where we have high orders or high areas of disorder, we have high areas of violence that's closely related to the drug activity occurring within those areas. So the goal is to work together," Driechel said. 

The timeline of the project is not indefinite, but it's also not clear how long this arrangement is set to last. 

"You know, we're optimistic. I think it's going to give us the ability to co-ordinate our deployment a little better, have our members — whether it's peace officers or police officers — much more visible in those public spaces," Driechel said. 

Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi says he's pleased with the change, but there is still a long way to go to address the issues.

"This crisis was in the making for decades. Every community in North America — small, large, big, medium-sized — is facing it, and everyone needs to work together," Sohi said. 

The initiative comes as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to voice concern about the permeability of the Canada-U.S. border when it comes to drugs like fentanyl. 

Ellis said this particular initiative is not a direct response to Trump's border talk, but that it is meant to align with Canada's direction on dealing with the drug crisis. 

The province expects to use federal funds to cover the overtime costs of the peace officers.

Temitope Oriola, a professor of criminology at the University of Alberta, said any time multiple levels of government can work together in the public interest, it's a win.

"However, this is a small aspect of what ought to be a much larger series of measures to combat fentanyl and the opioid crisis," he said.

"Boosting law enforcement presence is a good start, but it cannot be the sole or only solution to the problem."

Oriola said that police and peace officers can help in terms of the sale and distribution of illicit drugs, making arrests, and in some cases, help in the case of a drug poisoning in process. But they can't do everything. 

"Police officers and police officers are not nurses or social workers or psychiatrists. Not all of those that they will deal with necessarily distributed the drugs … So what are we doing to help those who are already addicted?" he said.

"Social disorder is a manifestation of a much deeper constellation of societal problems."