City police to improve response to ‘lower-priority calls’: WPS chief

The Winnipeg Police Service is planning on “realigning” some resources to enhance its community presence, local business owners were told at a safety-focused conference on Monday.

WPS Chief Gene Bowers took questions from business representatives as one of the speakers at the second annual retail crime prevention conference organized by the Sargent Business Community organization. While he declined to provide details, Bowers said police are looking at ways to be more proactive in community calls.

“We are realigning a lot of our resources so that we’re more responsive to the community and those calls for service,” he later told reporters.

“Every call is important to the person that’s calling, and it’s important to us, but we do prioritize the calls. Sometimes, those lower-priority calls weren’t, in my opinion, getting the attention they needed. So we’re realigning so we get those low-priority calls the attention they deserve.”

A detailed announcement will be made in the coming weeks, he said.

Several business owners in attendance Monday told the panelists they felt discouraged from calling police because they weren’t getting a fulsome response.

“What I’m trying to do, I want to be visible, I want to be in the community and I want to work with the community,” Bowers said.

“What I’m trying to do, I want to be visible, I want to be in the community and I want to work with the community.”

Later in the day, Manitoba Justice Minister Matt Wiebe pointed to lower numbers of call volumes to the WPS and province-led initiatives as ways police may be able to focus more on lower-priority crime calls.

“What that means is that it frees up some of the resources to be out there doing some of that police work that we all, I think, see the value in, and responding to the small stuff … I think there’s an element of, the small stuff leads to the big stuff, so I like to think that we should also address the small stuff when we can,” he said.

The conference is a chance for businesses with long-held frustrations around safety to meet police, politicians and community resource groups directly, said organizer Michael Paille.

“The whole purpose of this is just that we can’t fix the problem individually, we can only fix the problem as a joint force,” said Paille, who owns Cobra Collectibles on Sargent Avenue.

Paille said he’s dealt with thefts, destruction of security cameras and even a violent attack that resulted in him suffering a concussion and broken ribs. He knows he’s not alone in the community, but is hopeful more can be done.

“Yes, there’s a homeless problem. Yes, there’s a severe drug problem. As a business, can I fix those things? No, but together, can we do something? Of course.”

Part of addressing the issue is business leaders advocating for more community-based mental health and addictions response that “isn’t just locking people up and walking away and hoping the problem doesn’t go away,” said Jamil Mahmood, Main Street Project’s executive director.

“A city like Winnipeg should have five to 10 24-hour outreach teams. We have one,” he said. “That’s not enough to respond.”

“What we’ve heard all day today isn’t actually working. We have more police on the streets now … the funding for police has gone up, up, up, yet we’re still here.”

Some in the audience Monday were critical of the current approach to crime by the province and police. Among them, University of Winnipeg criminal justice Prof. Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land said the city police service is over-funded while other initiatives that address the needs of vulnerable people go under-funded.

“What we’ve heard all day today isn’t actually working. We have more police on the streets now … the funding for police has gone up, up, up, yet we’re still here,” she said during a question-and-answer session with Wiebe.

“We can never possibly have enough police to respond to the number of calls for service because that is not evidence-based practice … a strategy that relies on police is not evidence-based.”

Winnipeg’s violent crime severity index — a measurement that uses volume, severity, and the average court sentences of crimes — dropped five per cent in 2024, the most recent available data.

Shoplifting, however, increased 40.8 per cent — a trend Bowers attributed to increased enforcement.

At Artists Emporium on Roseberry Street, theft is a persistent issue, said owner Janeen Junson. She recalled an incident when a $1,200 airbrush was stolen and the thief was caught, then released on the promise they wouldn’t enter the store again.

“Most business owners I know, the big frustration is, even if we call the police, it won’t make a difference,” she said. “We never get our products back or our money back or anything.”

Junson said, however, she’s seen some recent improvements — which she attributed to pushback from business owners and a willingness to file police reports.

According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the number of businesses shuttering in Manitoba has outpaced the number of new openings for six quarters in a row.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.