By Khang Nguyen

New Community Safety Officers hit the streets

Aug 10, 2015 | 4:56 PM

The Prince Albert Police Service is officially unveiling the new Community Safety Officer program.

Community Safety Officers will have peace officer status and will primarily focus on traffic and liquor enforcement.

“They can now do things like stop motor vehicles in occasions when that’s something we’d like them to assist with,” said Chief Troy Cooper. “Whether that’s traffic enforcement, traffic safety, and safety control.”

“We just wanted the public to be aware that you may see this uniform pulling somebody over and that’s authorized and that’s supervised by the police service.”

Cst. Suzanne Stubbs was present at the police conference to show off the new dark grey uniform.

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“It’s actually been going very well. My other officer has actually been out a few times and it’s going very well,” Stubbs said.

Bylaw officers Stubbs and Cst. Kelleen Wolfe completed a six-week course to become Community Safety Officers. The course consisted of four weeks of classroom time at Saskatchewan Polytechnique in Regina and two weeks of online training.

“The training that the bylaws officers took is in Regina—the provincial standard of training—when they returned to the Prince Albert Police Service, we have our own traffic section,” said Cooper. “The traffic sergeants train them to safely stop vehicles and train them up to our current policies so they receive the same level of training and qualifications that any police officers in Saskatchewan have as far as traffic control.”

The Prince Albert Police Service hope that introducing the Community Safety Officers will free up frontline police officers to focus on higher impact needs within the community.

The police service intends to train further bylaw officers into Community Safety Officers in the future.

knguyen@jpbg.ca          

On Twitter: @khangvietnguyen