LPS public conversation focuses on downtown beat

By Lethbridge Herald on March 22, 2023.

A couple walks their dogs downtown Wednesday afternoon. Lethbridge police staged their first community conversation this week, focusing on the downtown patrol area. Herald photo by Al Beeber

Alejandra Pulido-Guzman – LETHBRIDGE HERALD – apulido@lethbridgeherald.com

The Lethbridge Police Service hosted the first of four community conversations Tuesday night in a discussion focusing on the downtown patrol area.

LPS chief Shahin Mehdizadeh said that overall he was very pleased with the conversation, with more than 50 people in attendence. 

“It was great, that is what we wanted for the public to show up so they can hear from us and we want to hear from them. We are looking forward to the other three community conversations,” said  Mehdizadeh. 

He said the downtown community conversation is a little bit more unique than the other three since there are people downtown for various reasons. 

“We have many different individuals who actually have a keen interest in our downtown core. There are those who actually live here, there are those who have businesses in downtown, and there are those who actually may live in other parts of the city but they use downtown businesses, restaurants, etc. So we’re quite happy to hear from different people,” said Mehdizadeh.

He said a lot of the conversation revolved around social issues, drug use, homelessness and encampments.

“We try to at least educate people on what police is doing and really what our capacity is to deal with some of these things, and also the partnerships that are critical in addressing some of the social issues because really it is not just the police who has to deal with it. There are more skilled organizations and agencies who have a very key role to play. But these are all good conversations, and we look forward to the future ones,” said Mehdizadeh. 

He said during the session he had a presentation in which he talked about crime rates and trends downtown. 

“We’re seeing downward crime trends which is great, both in the city and also in the downtown core, but some crime types have increased as I spoke to the city and the most significant increases we saw in a crime type, were crimes against persons,” said Mehdizadeh. 

He said the majority of them are assaults, but the key for the public to remember is that those are not just random people assaulting random individuals – they are usually people known to each other with the majority being part of the vulnerable population. 

“It’s not that these things should be alarming to our average good citizens, but that is what the stats say and we want to be very transparent and to at least let them know what are some of the trends that we’ve seen in downtown and in the future in different zones in the city,” said Mehdizadeh. 

“We didn’t do a survey but we had a mix of everyone because as people got up to speak, basically we had business owners  and we had people who live downtown and also those who don’t live downtown but they do come downtown and they obviously have their perception of what our downtown is all about,” said Mehdizadeh. 

He said during his presentation he also touched on what the downtown patrol area encompasses because some people may think it is smaller than it is. 

“We talked about the misconception of what downtown is, what the area of downtown is because people think it’s just a very small area and it’s much larger than that, so in a future presentation we want to actually show people when we talk about downtown what geographic area we really mean,” said Mehdizadeh. 

He said police wanted to make sure people knew what the area was, because when residents hear the crime rate stats they get alarmed. 

“That way when we give the numbers it’s not as alarming, like the numbers from 2022 we had over 11,700 calls for service in downtown, a combination of just about everything you can think of when people call the police,” said Mehdizadeh. 

The LPS downtown patrol area encompasses everything between the river valley east to Mayor Magrath Drive and from 5 Ave. North to 6 Ave. South. 

The next Community Conversation will take place on April 20 at St. Teresa of Calcutta School, 235 Mildred Dobbs Blvd North from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. to discuss the North area of the city.

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