Formal complaints made by residents toward Calgary Police Service (CPS) officers increased slightly in 2024, according to their Professional Standards Section (PSS) report, which was released on June 17. 

At a regular meeting of the Calgary Police Commission on June 25, the CPS’s Chief Strategy Officer, Katherine Murphy, presented the annual PSS report and announced that 272 external complaints were filed in 2024. 

Including any formal concerns submitted by the public regarding instances of alleged police misconduct, the external complaints for last year rose from the 252 received in 2023. 

While public interactions made up a total of 1,146 contacts in 2024, this is a slim difference from the 1,131 residents who brought forth their concerns the year before. Still, the 2024 numbers displayed a 13 per cent drop compared to the five-year average.

Murphy stressed that the statistic is calculated on a per capita basis. As a result of Calgary’s population having annually grown by three per cent since 2020, she said they remain in a progressive standing. 

“We’re seeing a good, strong trend of declining complaints against police officers,” said Murphy.

Citizen contacts and internal complaints — defined in order as concerns reported by members of the public or the Chief Constable — decreased in 2024, but showed no significant divergence from the five-year average.

Poor officer behaviour, service proves complaint majority

Of all of the complaints gathered, rude or unprofessional behaviour amounted to 51 per cent of all reports, while lack of service totalled 21 per cent. Sharing the same top two categories as the 2023 report, they increased by five per cent and decreased by nine per cent, respectively. 

Murphy said that these numerical shifts are minimal considering the longevity during which the themes have dominated the report. 

“Those categories remain fairly consistent year over year,” she said. 

“[They] basically mean a Calgarian is not satisfied with the quality of service they received, or the investigation that they received.”

Annually, the PSS determines a specific topic to guide improving its operations. Though the complaints are not unusual, Murphy said that the 2024 calendar year focused on investigating allegations of biased and unfair policing. 

“We don’t get a lot of these a year, but we felt it was important to take some deliberate efforts to improve how we investigate these complaints.”

Doing so, the PSS trained their investigators to look for signs of unjust treatment by officers toward community members. Even more, they updated their public report portal to offer an option where complainants could list aspects of their identity, including race and gender. 

“This is not mandatory, but if complainants are willing to self-disclose, it helps us analyze who our complainants are and helps us look at systemic issues in our process,” said Murphy. 

Only external and internal complaints warrant investigation, and the PSS said that this amounted to less than 11 per cent of all public contacts in 2024. Murphy said that due to several factors, the PSS’s investigations have become notably faster.  

“We’ve seen significant improvements in both efficiency and quality of investigations,” she said.

Investigation times continue to drop

Since 2022, the speed at which the PSS conducts its investigations has pursued an upward trend in productivity, and 2024 appears to be no exception. Last year, 78 per cent of files were closed in under 12 months — an eight per cent improvement from 2023, and 25 per cent from 2022. 

Aiding in the progress, body-worn cameras (BWC) assisted in the resolution of over 63 per cent of allegations. Murphy said that without the use of the cameras, investigations usually take around six months. But with the devices providing first-hand accounts of incidents, she said investigations are approximately two months faster. 

“Simply, that’s because of the quality of the evidence and how quickly we can see what happened,” said Murphy. 

Yet, she said that the evidence gained from the BWC’s should be viewed objectively, meaning that they should not serve as the end-all be-all conclusion. Instead, Murphy said that additional information is prioritized to factor into finalizations. 

“We always collect evidence from the complainant and, if necessary, we collect further evidence from the named officers as well,” she said. 

“While it’s helping us speed up our resolution timelines, we do not use it as conclusive in any given case.”

To view the 2024 Professional Service Standards report in full, the document is available on the Calgary Police Commission’s website.