The Saskatoon Police Service remains at 96 per cent when it comes to the percentage of staff who are vaccinated. That’s according to Chief Troy Cooper who presented some numbers on Thursday during the Board of Police Commissioners meeting.

Cooper says the police service received 560 calls for concerns surrounding COVID-19 in 2021. Majority of those calls were for gathering sizes.

“In fact that we wrote 120 tickets last year and 99 of those had to do with the initial public health order of gathering sizes and 21 had to do with masking and came after September 17th public health orders.”

So far in 2022, the police service has responded to 17 COVID-related calls and no summary offence tickets have been issued yet. Since the new year, 39 SPS staff have tested positive for virus. As of Monday, 19 staff were still at home isolating.

The police service saw 2700 more calls for service in 2021 than the previous year. Generally, the additional calls for service were around social disorder issues according to Cooper. He adds 1500 of the 2700 calls were for issues such as causing a disturbance or a suspicious person. Calls for service also went up in October, November and December compared to 2020.

“Generally in the colder months, October, November, December we see a reduction in calls. What we noticed this year is that those months of 2021, they were significantly higher than in 2020. So something occurred within the year that drove social issues up, calls related to social issues up and continued right to year end.”

The police chief hopes that some of the service’s programs will make an impact early on in 2022.