(Lethbridge News Now)

By Sarah Jones

but reported injuries down

Use of force up 27 per cent among LPS officers in 2020

Apr 26, 2021 | 2:34 PM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – The Lethbridge Police Service has released its 2020 Subject Behavior Officer Response (SBOR) Report, which tracks the use of force among police officers.

This year, the SPOR report saw an increase of 27 per cent being reported that involved more force from police. In 2019, there were only 143 reports, but in 2020, it reached 196.

SPOR Reports are only required when any use of force other than cooperative handcuffing and escort techniques are used, such as force resulting in injury, tactical display of a firearm or a taser, and accidental discharge of a firearm.

In 2020, 99 per cent of the calls for service were resolved by officers without the use of force.

Sgt. Rick Semenuik, who presented the SPOR Report, says that the main thing that stuck out to him was the lower number of injuries.

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“I know one of the things we were very proud of was the ‘de-escalation training’ that we introduced in 2020, which I think led to a big reason for the lowered number of injuries, and that’s definitely one thing that we are continuing in our training.”

Members normally receive 25 hours of training for control tactics and firearms, but in 2020, hours were reduced to 16 due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Sgt. Semenuik is planning for training to return back to 25 hours this year.

“As of right now, some of the training we have planned for the spring is training that we are able to do and still meets those COVID restriction requirements. We’ll see what the future holds, and hopefully, we’ll be able to still conduct all our training in the future.”

It was also reported that custodial arrests, or people being brought into custody, were down 1,262 from last year.

Semeniuk says this was the result of changes in the Criminal Code in December of 2019 which allowed for officers to have more discretion to release arrested subjects.

“Also, there were some operational changes because of COVID, we were releasing a lot more people that would normally be held in custody simply because of COVID requirements.”

There are currently no plans to change operations, as they are not seeing any trends that can be identified in the report.

The full report from the Lethbridge Police Commission starts on page 19 of their April agenda package here.