The Regina Board of Police Commissioners tabled the 2016 Use of Force report Wednesday morning. While most of the numbers are consistent with previous years, the Regina Police Service (RPS) have seen an increase in the use of the SWAT team in recent years.
The SWAT team was deployed 16 times last year. This is a decrease from 20 deployments in 2015. However, the team was used only six times in 2013.
Chief Evan Bray said this is because they are dealing with more high risk situations, as more firearms become involved in drug crimes.
Inspector Trevor Ewart, who is a former SWAT team member, backed up the Chief’s comments.
“High risk warrant services, we usually threat and risk assess those, and if it’s a high risk we usually have our SWAT team execute those warrants because it’s a higher risk and a little bit higher threshold than the capabilities of our frontline officers,” Ewart explained.
Last year there were 174 use of force reports submitted by RPS members; down from 181 in 2015. However, there were 93 instances when more than one “force option” was used to control a situation. A total of 264 force options were used.
Ewart said officers are consistently risk and threat assessing every situation when they are out in the field. To demonstrate this, Ewart used the example of officers responding to a call about an individual threatening to harm themselves with a knife.
“We also had members with a baton out, OC spray, so there were three, four, five different force options that were out, and maybe only one is administered.”
The RPS received approximately 80,000 calls for service in 2016.
Below is complete report of Regina Police use of force:
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