It matters how we look at things.

Edmonton Police Officers encountering people living in the most dreadful conditions in encampments is not a new story, nor is it new that our officers always ask whether we can get them to shelter or to other supports.

Nor is it new for us to hear “no”. Indeed, in the month before the Province’s new Navigation (Nav) Centre opened, our High Risk Encampment Teams asked 109 people whether they could help get them to available supports and only 1 said yes, that’s less than 1 per cent willing.

Getting people in encampments to accept help is complicated. There is a lot that goes into that yes or no equation. But what became clear from the first day the Nav Centre opened, is that the equation did change, immediately and persuasively.

Yet recent articles in the Edmonton Journal, which focused on a slice of data, led Journal readers to the opposite conclusion, that the removal of people from camps has been fruitless and indeed even potentially caused harm, such as incidences of frostbite. So here’s a bit more of the story.

For the first time in years, the efforts of our officers to move people into safety received an immediate and ongoing boost when the Nav Centre opened. Some of those people accepted a ride to the Centre immediately, on a warm bus the City provided. Others made their way there later, on their own, with our HELP Teams, Patrol officers and with other agencies and community members. But they did go, and now more than 3,000 people have sought services, support and shelter through the Nav Centre.

In turn, the tents did come down and the relief of the community following a year of record complaints and disruption has been palpable. It is very clear that our community wants to see the most vulnerable get help – and no reasonable person defines help as an encampment.

In looking at only four months of referrals from only a small part of our teams, the story presented too little context to draw the conclusions that it did. Some of the issues include that many of the results referenced in your stories were from duplicate interactions with the same people who our officers know well and who are asked about getting support multiple times. In turn, these interactions are recorded multiple times. The data is not the entirety of our interactions, many interactions with our HELP teams and patrol officers are not represented. And as noted above, the vastly different results one month before the Centre opened compared to its first month of operations were not considered. We can’t speculate as to why that was, but it seems very material to this story that referral acceptance jumped from 1 per cent to close to 35 per cent in the first month. Indeed, we would call that a significant success.

We have also further looked at the questions of frostbite and can report that at least part of the increased treatments that occurred were due to increased interventions by our teams who would regularly find people needing medical assistance for exposure, hypothermia, and frostbite. Lives were saved by our interventions. In one camp alone on January 22, 2024, 11 of 12 people needed treatment, and one had to be sent to emergency as she was close to death from exposure. Tents are no shield from these issues.

It is curious why a subset of social advocates in the city fight so hard to preserve encampments, and to seek to discredit efforts that have coalesced with the entry of the Nav Centre. From our perspective, we know the Centre has not solved the entirety of some very complex social issues, but it has represented the most impactful on-the-ground difference we’ve seen in years.

It’s not everything by any means, but it’s definitely a game-changer.

Dale McFee is Chief of Police for the Edmonton Police Service

Edmonton Journal article: https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/opinion-full-picture-needed-on-encampment-debate