Police chief focuses on pillars and milestones from past year

By Alejandra Pulido-Guzman - Lethbridge Herald on December 28, 2024.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDapulido@lethbridgeherald.com

Reflecting on the year that’s coming to a close, Lethbridge Police Services Chief Shahin Mehdizadeh says 2024 was productive and filled with positive moments.
Mehdizadeh points out that LPS has three pillars that it focuses on every year for strategic planning: internal health, community engagement and crime reduction.
“On the organization side, I believe that we’ve made significant strides in major recruiting drive and filling many vacancies that we had,” says Mehdizadeh.  
In 2024, LPS hired a total of 27 new officers, 13 of whom recently graduated. Eight more are already enrolled in the January cadet class at Lethbridge Polytechnic for next year.
“It’s been an epic year for us for recruiting and filling vacancies,” says Mehdizadeh.”I truly believe that has really improved the morale and also connection with the community and many other good things that we’ve seen in 2024.”
On the internal health front, LPS created an Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) action plan, which is an evolving document as they continue to make sure everyone feels like they are part of a respectful and welcoming environment at the organization.
“We want to make sure every employee feels valued,” says the chief. “They get a sense of belonging and they feel that they can access equitable treatment and also bring inclusivity into the organization and reflect that in our service to the community.”
He says that’s important because the community is growing and becoming more diverse. Police need to make sure every citizen gets the same level of service from LPS, regardless of their gender, colour of skin, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
LPS also increased interactions with members of Indigenous communities in the city in 2024, with help from its Indigenous advisory committee, Blackfoot elders and Metis community who provided advice on how to better connect with Indigenous people in Lethbridge and help foster truth and reconciliation ideals.
“Our Blackfoot values were unveiled this year, which was a big step for us to actually show our true respect to our Blackfoot people and integrating our values with translating them into their values,” says Mehdizadeh.  
He adds that the artist did an amazing job in representing what a path to reconciliation can look like between LPS and members of Indigenous communities.  
“And we’ve obviously done many other things with many events with our youth as well,” says Mehdizadeh. “We continue to do charity check stop near Christmas time to get toys and food for people in need during the holiday season. Trunk and Treat for the second year was an amazing event, (as well as) Slow Your Roll, which we are very proud to partner with them to keep our streets safe. And we’re going to continue supporting these initiatives.”
Community engagement has been critical, the chief says, so LPS held four town hall meetings and multiple impromptu meetings with local residents while out and about in 2024.
Other significant events that took place during the year include the 60th anniversary of the K-9 unit, the 50th anniversary of the Tactical Team and the fifth anniversary of The Watch.
“There are many milestones that we’ve achieved this year,” says Mehdizadeh. “We also retired three police service dogs and got three new dogs to replace them and the retired dogs are enjoying life of retirement and keep looking after them until their last day.” 
A number of other events took place this year in which LPS was either involved or present, including many to raise money for Special Olympics. The service also added another facility dog, named Cruiser, through the Victim Services Unit. Cruiser will help support victims of crime, especially in court settings.  
“On our third pillar of crime reduction, it’s been an amazing year,” says Mehdizadeh. “We continue to evolve our CompStat to be even more aggressive on targeting the right people and right location,” says Mehdizadeh.  
CompStat is a data-driven model where analytics are used to identify high-crime areas, prolific offenders and the most effective deployment of police resources. It focuses on four core components: timely and accurate information or intelligence, rapid deployment of resources, effective tactics and relentless follow-up. 
“We started the hot zone policing, other than downtown because officers already know that is a hot zone,” says Mehdizadeh. “We are looking at emerging hot zones, so this could be very quiet places in the city that may have only two complaints in a month, but if we see eight complaints one month we think there might be something happening to quadruple the amount of calls.” 
He explains that basically officers are paying more attention to those in order to catch them at the early stages and hopefully deal with whatever is causing the crime to increase the calls for service in that area.
“Collectively these efforts have resulted in significant drop in 2024 of our crime and CSI ratings, which we can’t really share that at this point because we’re always a few months behind on that but will be shared in the new year,” the chief says.
Another area that improved in 2024 is the perception of safety from Lethbridge residents, which Mehdizadeh says makes him happy and proud.
“The perception of safety has increased by at least five per cent compared to last year, which is good news for us, because we can drive crime down, we can drive a CSI down, but if people don’t feel safe, there is no real sense of safety. That improvement shows that our efforts are paying off.” 
The information was obtained through phone surveys with various questions regarding residents’ sense of safety across the city.

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