In the wake of a several high-profile crimes and incidents downtown, a new task force has begun meeting to identify issues and provide recommendations to the City of Calgary to improve the safety and well-being of people in the area.
The Downtown Safety Leadership Table was announced on July 5 by Mayor Jyoti Gondek, and the committee has been meeting every other week since September with community partners to identify safety issues and possible solutions.
“There’s [the] perception of safety issues, then there’s the reality of safety issues,” says Mark Garner, co-chair of the group. “Calgary is probably doing more than other cities across Canada, but every city across Canada has the same issues.”
The task force will be meeting for 120 days every other week and will provide its recommendations to the city in early January.
“We’re taking a proactive step to identify what needs to be done to make sure downtown is safe and inclusive for everybody,” says Garner.
For the 38,000 people who live in downtown Calgary and the thousands more who visit every day, this task force serves as a possibility that the current downtown situation may be on the road to improvement. According to the Calgary Police Service, violent crime was up 7.5 per cent last year in the downtown compared to the five-year average.
One Calgarian feeling the impacts of the rise of crime in downtown is Andy Crocker. Crocker used to take public transportation downtown but now avoids it due to an incident where he and his daughter were riding the C-train and a group of people released pepper spray in the train cabin, causing minor injuries to many passengers on board and forcing them to leave the train.
“She hasn’t taken it since actually, she was so scared,” says Crocker referring to his daughter. “I think we have a good system, I just feel that maybe more security and more monitoring might be more helpful and might make it more safe for the general public.”