Breaking Down Data Silos for Community Safety and Well-being in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Cities across Canada, like Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, face increasing pressure to service people and places with complex needs. For example, the visibility of people experiencing mental health crises and homelessness appears to be at an all-time high. However, these high-need populations are also often wrongfully equated with crime and disorder. This results in increased fear within communities and demands for improved safety, including increasingly punitive approaches.

The responsibility for improving community safety has largely been downloaded to municipal agencies. These municipal agencies often work in silos, despite the fact that their services often overlap: supporting the same people and places without any long-term collaborative strategy for prevention. Research on crime and place has long indicated the need to triangulate crime data with other data sources, including other emergency responders, and service providers, at the local level to better understand spatialized risk and develop effective and sustainable prevention and response strategies. However, service providers are hindered by the inability to share the data needed to identify patterns of high needs people and places and support evidence-based policy. Importantly, these service providers are often ill-equipped to respond to these needs alone. Research demonstrates that a collaborative and integrated approach would not only be more cost effective but would also better serve communities.

The proposed project brings together municipal service providers in the city of Saskatoon to build a data-sharing framework that will improve evidence-based decision making, advance evidence-based policy, and reduce repetitive and punitive responses to high needs people and places across the city. The proposed project will build on a ten-year relationship between the PI and City of Saskatoon, and the Saskatoon Police Service, to bring together data from three key partners (including police, fire, and city planning data) in Saskatoon to create the capacity to identify systemic and ongoing problem locations and high-need clientele.

The goal of the project is to enable service providers within the City of Saskatoon to develop a clear understanding of the common needs of their community and to provide more meaningful interventions and prevention strategies to support high-need clientele. The proposed project will also create essential long-term pathways for data sharing through the secure data centre located at CRSP. This framework will be transferable to other municipalities in Canada, to support secure and de-identified data-sharing, advance evidence-based crime prevention policies in other jurisdictions, and improve services across Canada.