Building a safe community: Front-line workers weigh in on priority issue in Saskatoon civic election
Candidates had their say about community safety. Here's what the people already doing the work want
It's Friday morning at Build Up and Aaron Timoshyk just sent today's construction crews to their job sites. His job as program manager got a lot easier when Build Up moved its workshop from a sea can into an actual building.
Inside the workshop, before he heads out to the job sites himself, Timoshyk takes a moment to talk about Saskatoon's civic election.
"We're in unique times," Timoshyk said. "I often hear about common sense solutions and back to basics. These are not common times. We don't need common responses. This requires some creativity and some imagination and we just need people to be courageous."
Mayoral candidates are pitching a range of idea to voters: larger police budgets, a task force, more shelters and fewer shelters. The politicians have had their say. Here's what people working on the front lines want to see from Saskatoon's new city council and mayor.
From conviction to construction
Now in its fifth year, Build Up is a social enterprise established by Quint, a community economic development organization working in the core neighbourhoods. Build Up offers trades training and employment for people with criminal convictions, often for serious crimes.
"It's kind of a wonderful way to give back for folks who may at some point have harmed the community and are now part of healing it," Timoshyk said.
And it provides one solution to the question of community safety.
"The best way to fight crime is with a job. You give people employment," Timoshyk said.
"You can create community safety through giving folks an opportunity to enjoy some personal prosperity … They can support themselves, their families and their communities because fundamentally we don't believe that crime is a choice, it's an outcome."
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Build Up crews work on derelict properties in the core neighbourhoods, renovate Quint's own housing stock, and whatever odd job comes their way. They do everything except electrical and plumbing.
And it's working, according to a case study from The Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan. By giving people jobs and keeping them out of jail, the study found Build Up saves money compared to incarceration and policing costs and prevents crime because participants don't re-offend.
One worker said he's spent his life in and out of jail, but this last year spent with Build Up is the first year-long stretch he hasn't been arrested since his teens. Another worker said Build Up stabilized her life and helped her regain custody of her kids.
Timoshyk said people often ask why they help people with criminal records.
"The reality is that just about everybody who's committed a crime was a victim themselves at some point in their lives, often as a child," Timoshyk said.
"And so we're working with folks to basically help them get to a position where now when they're raising their children, their children are growing up in healthier environments. It's a multi-generational effort."
Helping hands on the street
It's Thursday night and volunteers of SAGE Clan Patrol are pulling three carts of donations — food, winter gear, basic necessities like tampons and socks — to hand out in the area around Saskatoon's St. Paul's Hospital in the Pleasant Hill neighbourhood.
They haven't walked more than three blocks in half an hour and supplies are dwindling. The volunteers ask everyone they see if they need anything. Some are teenagers just walking home, some are camped out in dark corners alongside buildings. Nobody turns down the group's offer.
The 2022 point-in-time homelessness count found 550 unhoused people in Saskatoon, and unofficial numbers from this fall's count suggest at least a 50 per cent increase in people lacking permanent shelter.
The Saskatoon fire department counted 932 encampments of unhoused people from Jan. 1 to Sept. 15 this year. There were 1,020 in all of 2023, doubling the previous year's count.
SAGE volunteers handed out half the soup and sandwiches, with naloxone kits and socks going fast, before arriving at the spot where they know demand will be high.
"If it gets too crowded too fast, we can always back out," said a veteran volunteer as the group walks down the alley behind Prairie Harm Reduction.
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Dozens of people are hanging out, alone or in small groups.
A crowd forms around the carts, and people ask for what they need: a blanket, a sweater, a couple bottles of water, sandwiches. Soon it's just a few bottles of water and pairs of thin gloves left.
Sidney Searle is a first-time volunteer with SAGE and lives in Riversdale. She said community safety is about getting involved at the grassroots and treating everyone with dignity.
"People are scared to have [shelters] in their community, but I don't know why," Searle said. "People are already on the street anyway. The difference is between people having a home in the community or being on the street."
Whose safety is a concern?
At the 20th Street West office of CLASSIC, the province's only community legal clinic, Chantelle Johnson points out a glaring omission in civic election conversations about safety and crime.
"A lot of our community members don't feel like anyone cares about them," said Johnson, CLASSIC's longtime executive director.
"I think often what's missing from that safety discussion is talking about the safety of the folks who are forced to or have no other option but to live on the street … Arguably, they're the least safe people in our society."
Johnson said politicians see shelters and bigger police budgets as the solution rather than a symptom of complex social issues.
"There's no way you can police your way out of issues that are directly associated with poverty, mental health and addictions," Johnson said.
"And so even though people often want a really simple answer to complicated issues, just policing alone isn't going to get us feeling any more safe … We hear a lot of rhetoric and grandiose statements, but actual explicit plans are lacking."
Calls to police increased 4.5 per cent so far this year compared to 2023, according to a Saskatoon police report earlier this year. Officers are responding to more situations involving weapons and getting more "social disorder" calls, which involve intoxication and disturbances that aren't necessarily criminal.
The Saskatoon Census Metropolitan Area reported a five per cent rise in the crime rate, according to the 2023 Crime Severity Index, which measures the volume and types of crime in cities. That's a slower rise than the previous year, but twice the rate increase recorded in 2021.
Police also reported a 2.2 per cent increase in property crimes in 2023. While break and enters dropped about 10 per cent year-over-year, shoplifting jumped 69 per cent.
Johnson said all the issues affecting community safety — encampments, affordable housing access, addictions and mental health — can't be addressed by municipalities alone. The problems and solutions cut across all levels of governments. Johnson hopes Saskatoon's new city council quickly learns to work with provincial and federal counterparts.
"A lot of the stuff that Saskatoon is dealing with and our experience at CLASSIC is directly related to social policy at the provincial level. What we'd like to hear is some discussions about trying to collaborate with the provincial government and build relationships to try to address some of these issues together."
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