Saskatoon councillors asking questions after parking enforcement officers given body cameras

Councillors on a City of Saskatoon committee want more information after discovering parking enforcement officers have been wearing body cameras for more than a year.

Enforcement officers were given the cameras in March 2021 in an attempt to keep officers safe on the streets as they hand out parking tickets.

On Monday, the camera issue was flagged during the city's planning and development committee during a year-end report by the community standards department.

Councillors on the committee said this was the first time they had heard of the project and wanted more information.

"There may very well be some substantial benefits here," said Coun. Mairin Loewen. 

"I think it's probably necessary for us, from a due diligence standpoint, to spend a little bit more time understanding the implications." 

Last month, the Saskatoon Police Service began a pilot program involving 40 cameras spread throughout the city and spent a year working through the privacy implications in a series of meetings.

Matt Grazier, director of the community standards department which oversees parking enforcement, said that the program had been fully vetted by the city's privacy experts.

"There certainly was an extensive privacy impact assessment that looked at a variety of things, like who has access to the data, what's the process for transferring the data and how the data is stored," said Grazier in an interview.

Grazier said the city purchased roughly 20 cameras that are worn daily by officers as they patrol the streets. Along with parking enforcement officers, crews working to impound or put traffic boots on vehicles for unpaid parking tickets also wear the cameras.

He said the city decided to implement the program to keep officers safe. While Grazier did not have a number of the assaults reported by enforcement officers, he said that it was an issue the city took seriously.

"It was really a method utilized to look at de-escalating those situations," he said.

"There certainly have been assaults that have led to parking enforcement officers being hospitalized. That's not not the norm, but it certainly has happened."

The process to evaluate the body camera program started in 2019.

Grazier said that the cameras are only turned on in a threatening situation and members of the public are warned before that happens.

The cost for the program is estimated at around $4,000.

The city contracts out its parking enforcement duties to private company Commissionaires, which did not want to comment for this story.

Councillors asked the city to report back on how many assaults had been reported by parking enforcement officers and whether the cameras had helped to decrease those numbers. They also asked the city for a full breakdown on privacy measures used in the collection and storage of the data.