2023 Transit Peace Officer Performance Summary
The following is a summary of the findings from the 2023 Transit Peace Officer evaluation
process:
● ETS survey metrics around perceived safety declined in the early part of 2023 but began to trend upwards in the latter half of the year.
● As previously reported, EPS data indicates actual safety is improving in transit spaces, with fewer police incidents overall and fewer violent incidents than in 2022.
● TPOs were dispatched to more than 56,000 events in 2023 (over 150 calls per 24-hour period), an increase from 2022 when the TPOs were dispatched to approximately 48,000 events.
● Four event types account for approximately 50 per cent of the dispatched calls: check on welfare (19 per cent), lock/unlock procedure (15 per cent), trouble with person (10 per cent), and drugs (8 per cent).
● Notable increases were observed in public complaint volumes for trouble with persons, checks on welfare, drug complaints and assaults.
● The median response time for TPOs to arrive at dispatched events was nine minutes and 43 seconds.
● Current staffing levels primarily support a reactive response to calls for service, which form the majority of the TPO workload (73 per cent). Despite the implementation of the Transit Community Action Teams (foot patrol in LRT) in early 2022, designed to support proactive enforcement presence, the TPO program has not been able to achieve pre-pandemic proactive enforcement levels which were greater than 50 per cent of their time. In 2023, proactive enforcement work accounted for only 27 per cent of the TPO workload. Proactive enforcement is an evidence-based approach to interrupt patterns of problematic behaviours and prevent issues rather than simply respond to those issues.
● TPO random fare inspections ranged from approximately 1,000 to 11,000 per month. The variability can be attributed to an increase in calls for service across the network, which pulls TPOs away from proactive work, including fare inspections. Fare inspections by TPOs were highlighted as a critical component of the fare system in the 2019 Edmonton Transit Service Revenue Management Audit.
● Of the calls to which TPOs were dispatched using the tiered policing/security model, they had to request police attendance at only 1.9 per cent of them, showing that the dispatch triaging process is working to send the right resources to the right calls. The proportion of events that required police attendance on scene decreased slightly in 2023 from 2022. Administration monitors this number to ensure there is as little duplication as possible between tiers of the overall safety and security response in the transit network.
● TPOs most frequently provide education or warnings, resorting to tickets only 17 per cent of the time when infractions were detected and addressed. This ratio has decreased significantly from 2017, when 43.2 per cent of enforcement actions resulted in a ticket.
● TPOs documented 481 administrations of naloxone, a 77 per cent increase from the prior year.
● 2022 - 272
● 2021 - 231
● There is no notable change in the number of formal complaints regarding TPOs.
● Reportable use of force events have remained consistent despite increases in both ridership and the events with weapons. This data indicates that TPOs are increasingly able to resolve incidents without any use of force.
● TPOs were assaulted 133 times in 2023. The number of assaults against officers has increased by 40 per cent since 2019.
● Frontline overtime hours are consistent with the previous two years; however, average overtime hours per FTE decreased as a result of an increased complement of frontline staff and staffing model changes in response to peak demand times.
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