A fugitive breaks parole, and flees Calgary seeking to escape officers and hopefully the law.

However, the arm of the law is long—and to date more than 260 of Alberta’s most prolific and dangerous offenders who are on parole or are awaiting trial have been located and arrested across the province.

That is thanks to the Alberta Sheriffs’ Fugitive Apprehension Sheriffs Support Team, which has seven officers in Calgary, and seven in Edmonton, assisting local law enforcement agencies across the province to ensure that there is nowhere in the province that a fugitive can flee.

Although the Calgary Police Service has and continues to operate its fugitive apprehension team within the service, Police Chief Mark Neufeld said that the new initiative from the Government of Alberta was assisting to keep Calgarians safer.

“The reality of it is, I think this adds capacity. There’s that additional piece of making sure that we’re de-conflicting and making sure that we’re working on different people, and making sure that the work is complementary, but I also think it’s good for Calgarians as we see certain offenders who’ve been targeted leave the Calgary community,” Chief Neufeld said.

“We can rely on our partners to be able, whether it be FASST, whether it be RCMP in their jurisdictions, to be able to pursue into those locations which allows us to leave our resources in Calgary to deal with issues and offenders that are in Calgary, and harming Calgarians.”

He said that the work that CPS is doing with FASST is part of the overall collaboration that continues to be ongoing within and between law enforcement agencies.

“There are more than enough people to be arrested right now in our communities, which with everything that’s going on, one thing we know is that offenders are mobile. We’ve seen that, particularly in the most prolific offenders in the province,” said Chief Neufeld.

“We see that they move between communities very fluidly. So it’s important that law enforcement be coordinated and aligned in the same way, and we can move similarly.”

Specialized response to important aspect of justice system

Mike Letourneau, Superintendent with the Alberta Sheriffs, said that all of the members of FASST have received specialized training and operate as plainclothes police officers, with a singular goal of apprehending fugitives.

“Police services find and apprehend fugitives every single day across the province, and they do a commendable job of it. The intent of FASST is not to replace or take over that function, but rather augment it and support it. More Resources means faster results and safer operations,” he said.

Among the services that FASST has been providing police forces and the justice system, include escaped prisoners, charged but not located suspects, sentenced offenders on statutory release, parole or probation who have violated conditions, and people awaiting trial who have violated bail conditions.

Minister of Public Safety Mike Ellis said that the Sheriffs have been able to execute over 1,300 warrants since February of this year—albeit out of a total of 82,000 outstanding.

Speaking to the media on Sept. 17 about the success of the program, he said that the province has committed $2.6 million towards FASST to support the work by local law enforcement.

“We did hear feedback, not just from community members, but, you know, certainly, obviously, from law enforcement that you know there are, there are shortages out there. As you’ve heard me say time and time again, when it comes to a 911, call, I expect somebody to go to that call,” Minister Ellis said.

“I don’t care what the uniform is. If we can free up some of those frontline officers from taking time out of their day to go on the hunt for active warrants as an example, and folks in the Sheriffs can maybe do that duty, as they have been doing in rural Alberta, then that just frees up more frontline officers.”

He said that the model is nothing new for the province, it just hasn’t been in use for some time.

“There was a fugitive apprehension team about 20 years ago, and through choices that were made by successive governments down the road, they didn’t exist,” Ellis said.

“But, from my perspective as a frontline officer myself, back in the day, I thought that there was real value to that in helping Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, and the RCMP in rural Alberta.”