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COVID’s fifth wave isn’t affecting operations at the Regina Police Service, at least not yet.
Regina Police Chief Evan Bray said there have been some positive cases in the building and some who are close contacts.
“It hasn’t really inhibited operations at all, we’ve been able to maintain a lot of the work that we continue to do and are needed to do in the community,” said Bray.
While some police services in Canada and North America have seen some big challenges in relation to staffing, Bray said so far absence rates around illness are about the same as what the services has seen around this time in other years.
Bray said there is a benefit of having gone through the others waves and making adjustments then, that now it’s like flipping a switch.
“Basically, what can we do to keep the front end of our organization safe and healthy, because the stuff that we do in the office in terms of gathering, getting together, even training opportunities can sometimes cause for the spread of the virus,” explained Bray.
The Chief said that they’re doing what they can to make sure they don’t have, for example, 20 people on one shift off sick.
“We haven’t had that yet and we’re hoping that the steps that we’ve taken will prevent that from happening,” said Bray.
If that does happen, Bray said they have a contingency plan – “dispersed readiness” which the service had done at the beginning of the pandemic.
He explained that it included bringing in anyone who doesn’t work on front line policing and having them in that capacity and allowing people to stay home for a period of time while others worked so they can stay healthy.
“We haven’t gone to that yet but I think if we see the need to do something like that, we could do it, we could go very quickly,” said Bray.
Bray said they did that at the start of the pandemic but at that time many things were closed, like schools, so there were more officers available – now the world is still open.
“But I still think we’re in a good position,” said Bray.
