Mayor to request Sheriffs help to deal with encampments

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on April 5, 2023.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Lethbridge city council on Tuesday voted by a 6-2 motion to seek help from the Alberta Sheriffs to manage homeless encampments here.
The motion authorized mayor Blaine Hyggen to write a letter on behalf of council and the City to Public Safety and Emergency Services Minister Mike Ellis seeking that assistance on a six-month trial basis starting in May.
The motion states that in much of 2022 Lethbridge was inundated with encampments with individual camp sites giving way to a massive encampment reaching more than 90 structures in and around Civic Park. “Efforts to provide services and dismantle this encampment took months to accomplish while adjacent neighbourhoods feared for their safety,” the motion added.
The Lethbridge Police Commission is to be copied on the request letter with a request to provide input, according to the motion.
Deputy mayor John Middleton-Hope, in discussion of the motion after a question from councillor Jeff Carlson, said “this request is actually a fulsome examination of a process that the Minister of Public Safety has initiated by identifying that there are available Sheriffs to drop in to the cities of Edmonton and Calgary. Candidly, both of those initiatives have met with varying degrees of success and challenges.
Middleton-Hope said that from previous personal experiences that “Lethbridge has often been viewed as the lesser of the mid-sized or larger cities and so the scraps often do not necessarily fall from the table to the City of Lethbridge.
“It was an opportunity to say to the Minister that in fact there is a third city that experiences some significant challenges. Housing and homelessness is primarily a provincial responsibility. This is an opportunity to step up and say ‘we can do two things with this. We can assist the Lethbridge Police Service and the community of Lethbridge in bridging a period of time where they are struggling to hire new personnel to fill significant gaps.’
“The second piece is to respond to a community crisis. Who better, quite candidly, than the Sheriffs? To simply to drop them into the City of Lethbridge and ask them to go to traffic collisions and go to domestic disputes and so forth is simply not palatable. They don’t necessarily have the training, they don’t necessarily have the authority, they certainly lack the inter-operability between our systems to be able to do that,” said Middleton-Hope.
“So dropping them in and asking them to walk the beat or perform a law enforcement function in the downtown core seems to be an opportunity to squander resources. This is a request to the Minister to provide strategic resources on a strategic initiative which is to better manage encampments in the spring of 2023,” Middleton-Hope said.
Middleton-Hope said the time period provides a window of when the encampments are “the most acute in the city, so generally between April and October and it will provide us with an opportunity to examine how the deployment works, how the Sheriffs are able to work with” other other areas of the city and service providers.
“And I think then at that time we’ll be able to have a fulsome examination to determine what that looks like going forward,” said the deputy mayor.
He said he doesn’t want to encroach on Lethbridge Police Service responsibilities and abilities to perform a law enforcement function in the city.
“This is an opportunity to provide them with additional resources to get them over that bridge gap between where they are today in an under-resourced capacity to a better-resourced capacity tomorrow.”
Voting against the motion were councillors Belinda Crowson and Carlson.

Follow @albeebHerald on Twitter

4
-3