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The Healthy Streets Operations Centre is where the community safety teams will gather to plan their activities for the day.
It is not intended as a store-front type of centre where people can go to report crimes or to seek help. It will not be accessible to the public.
The community safety teams consist of City of Edmonton Community Safety Liaisons and peace officers, Edmonton Police Service Officers, Alberta Health Services Paramedics, Edmonton Fire Rescue Services Community Safety Officers and Government of Alberta Sheriffs.
The community safety teams will be fanning out 5 days a week, mornings, afternoons and evenings, throughout Chinatown, Downtown and Kingsway, connecting with residents and business owners, people experiencing homelessness and those who come into these communities. Their goal is to work with communities to address safety issues, while ensuring that those who are in need are connected with the appropriate community resources, such as housing and healthcare.
If you wish to report a crime or need assistance:
In person reporting of police related incidents are to be directed to the closest police station.
The safety teams want to ensure everyone's safety is taken into account. This includes the victimization experienced by those who are experiencing homelessness. As such, we establish relationships with community partners to help connect people to the supports and resources they need.
We are working with REACH Edmonton, Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society and Homeward Trust to provide oversight and guidance on the Healthy Streets Operations Centre, ensuring that the work on the ground is coordinated and connected to other initiatives and efforts, and learning is used to adapt our approaches.
As new initiatives or projects are identified, the City Community Safety Liaisons will also engage with other community agencies and stakeholders. Partners and their collective responses will be flexible as the teams adapt their work to meet the communities’ needs.
The primary outcomes of this two-year pilot are:
As the initiative progresses, we will be flexible and adjust our approaches as needed and guided by community concerns.
We know that it may take time to work through the many issues in the identified communities. Working with the social agencies, community partners, the City’s Community Safety Liaisons, Edmonton Police Service, community peace officers and Alberta Health Services paramedics will help us to deal with the complex issues impacting these communities. As we near the end of the initiative in 2024, we will be able to identify where work is still needed and what plans are required.
We determined this was the best location to meet the needs of the Community Safety Teams and it is fairly central for Chinatown, Downtown and Kingsways, the areas which are the focus of this initiative.
Staff will primarily use this space for meetings and will deploy to Chinatown, Downtown and Kingsway as part of the City’s efforts to address safety concerns with the larger goal of helping ensure the ongoing future of these vital parts of Edmonton. Furthermore, given that the teams are a multi-agency approach, the space will be a physical location that brings partners together to increase collaboration and problem solving amongst all team members. The location will not be used like a community station as the infrastructure does not currently support such an approach.
This initiative comes in addition to the transit safety strategy that is focused on safety on the transit service and in stations. The Healthy Street Operations Centre community safety teams are focused on identifying safety issues and working with communities on ways to address the problems.
For example, our teams have been relying on both historical data and community concerns to inform actions. Once a task is identified, our teams work together to identify how each respective area can address their portion of the issue at hand and work collaboratively to implement interventions and action plans. Some requests are as simple as additional visibility and community engagement, while others are more complex and require a problem-oriented approach.
Our focus will be to put the right resources in the right places to maximize efficiency and thus, measure the outcomes associated with our collective efforts.
This will be a learning process for all of us. We will be trying some new approaches and we know we won’t always get it right and we will learn from those challenges in order to continually improve. We will be evaluating approaches as we go so that we can pivot as needed.
The City, Edmonton Police Service and our external partners are all monitoring a number of measures to better understand whether what we’re doing is working. The first full report is expected to be complete in June 2023, with further reports being prepared at quarterly intervals.
Over the course of this initiative, we will look at what is working and what is not in order to inform any future approaches to addressing issues and concerns in the community. Council funded this initiative until the end of 2024 and we will be reporting back on successes and challenges. At the end of 2024 we will recommend to Council future actions beyond 2024.