My Statement on Today’s Provincial Transit Safety Funding Announcement
Edmonton has made steady progress on transit safety, but we need to do more.
More than a million times a week, Edmontonians get on the bus or the train and they expect to get safely to their destination, and nearly all of the time, they do. The vast, vast majority of trips on transit happen without incident.
At the same time, that’s not good enough.
I want to be clear for Edmontonians who feel unsafe on transit: I am listening. I have read your messages and heard about your experiences while taking the bus and LRT. Many of you take transit to get to work or to get an education, and each and every one of you deserves to feel confident in our transit system. Council has heard your concerns and has taken action over the past year.
Let me recap what we have done:
- In 2022, Council approved the Transit Safety Plan, as well as presented the Government of Alberta with the Downtown Core and Transit System Safety Plan, and we added an additional $13.5 million to transit safety resources through budget 2023 .
- The City has hired a Director of Transit Safety to lead this work. They are bringing people and skills together.
- We have also hired an additional transit security dispatcher to support the Transit Watch program and oversee the surveillance cameras in use across the system.
- Tomorrow, we will launch our bystander awareness campaign, responding to recommendations from the community.
- We continue to increase the presence of security, peace officers, and community outreach workers as well. This work is ensuring that we have the right people in the right place at the right time. We have added more Transit Peace Officers and are currently recruiting more.
- We have over 110 staff members within our Transit Peace Officer teams, including frontline officers, sergeants and management. By this fall, we’ll have the full complement of our team hired, trained, and deployed, nearly 20% growth and seeing 20 more Transit Peace Officers in transit spaces.
- Other supports, like the Community Outreach Transit Team — a partnership between the City and Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society, have doubled over the same period. These teams are made up of 1 Transit Peace Officer and 1 social outreach worker.
- Ongoing, sustainable funding was approved for the Community Outreach Transit Team (read my blog about this here) with five teams currently operational, and once fully staffed, COTT will have seven teams.
- We have also invested in safety in the core of the city, including $15.2 million for the Healthy Streets Operations Centre which will bring 48 new constables and 6 new sergeants to Chinatown, as well as 4 Peace Officer Sergeants and 14 Community Peace Officers.
- In 2023, the EPS budget will be going up by an additional $7 million as well.
- We have also increased the hours of service for security guards in some of our locations, and mobile drug poisoning prevention teams have been engaged for LRT stations through a community health partnership.
Over the past year, we’ve made significant progress on a number of fronts, and today, the Government of Alberta is supplementing this work as well.
We appreciate the additional funding for more police officers. We also appreciate the additional funding for the Police and Crisis Response Team (PACT teams), pairing a mental health worker with a police officer. I’ve recently been joining on ride alongs with interdisciplinary teams and I am so impressed with the work that they do. I agree that more resources across the system will help keep riders safer. It takes time to recruit and train new officers. We have programs in place to do this work, and we will get underway as soon as possible.
I also appreciate that the Government of Alberta is putting in new resources to keep LRT spaces clean. We will begin work right away to increase the frequency of cleaning in transit centres and on LRT platforms. We hope to see these investments implemented as soon as possible, and on a permanent basis, to address our urgent needs.
These investments will help us stabilize the situation but we need to continue to work on long term solutions, which includes investing in root causes. The supports being provided today are important, and they help bring together good people to keep our community safe. But let me be clear, even with this additional funding, there are still challenges that need to be dealt with. We will continue to work with our partners in the province on addressing long term sustainable solutions, such as supportive housing and wraparound services to deal with the mental health and substance use crises. This is something we will continue to advocate for.
On behalf of Edmontonians, thank you to the Government of Alberta for hearing our requests for urgent assistance. We ask that you keep listening, and provide the services that are so desperately needed.
