Expert says number of police shootings in Canada 'spectacularly unrelenting'

The family of a woman shot by an officer in Edmonton during a wellness check said her death was unnecessary, as the number of police shootings across Canada show little sign of relenting over the past four years.

"I see my daughter's death as being a result of a complete mishandling of the tools available to law enforcement in the application of dealing with mental health issues," the family of the woman, who has not been publicly identified, said in a statement from their lawyer, Tom Engel.

Edmonton police have said officers were called for a welfare check earlier this month. There were risks the woman may harm herself, so police say officers entered the apartment. There was a confrontation and the woman was shot.

The woman's family said that had the police approach been gradual and gentle, she would have understood the nature of the visit and would still be alive.

A tally compiled by The Canadian Press found police shot at 85 people in Canada between Jan. 1 and Dec. 15 of this year — 41 fatally. Those numbers are based on available information from police, independent investigative units and reporting from The Canadian Press.

"This is a spectacularly unrelenting phenomenon," said Temitope Oriola, a professor of criminology at the University of Alberta and president of the Canadian Sociological Association.

This year, the number of police shootings has nearly matched the total from 2022, when 94 people were shot at, 50 fatally. It remains a significant increase from four years ago, when there were 61 shootings, 38 of which were fatal.

The resulting snapshot shows more officers firing their guns since 2020, when the high-profile murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis spurred global movements urging police accountability and transparency.

Criminologists say officers need more training and restraint, while the RCMP union said police have been forced to the front lines of Canada's mental health crisis and face increasingly dangerous situations.

"No cop that I have ever dealt with wants to go down this road," said Brian Sauve, president of the National Police Federation, which represents about 20,000 Mounties across Canada.

"And every one of them is impacted momentously by the fact that they've had to discharge their weapon."

Officers have the right to safety, Oriola said, but police shootings in Canada have been trending upward for too many years. Oriola added he is particularly concerned about the number of shootings in Alberta.

"We should not be leading the country in terms of police shootings," he said.

This year, Alberta saw 21 police shootings — a rate of 0.45 per 100,000 people — marking a 90 per cent increase from 2020, when there were 11.