(Prince Albert Police Service/Facebook)

By Susan McNeil

Crime trends

Deputy Chief calls on family, community to improve reporting in wake of teen with gun

May 13, 2025 | 12:18 PM

Family and community have an opportunity to do more to help prevent incidents like a 14-year-old boy running from officers while carrying a sawed-off shotgun as the outcome could have been much different, according to Deputy Chief of Police, Farica Prince.

Prince was at the Public Board of Police Commissioners (PBOPC) meeting on Tuesday morning and said that like many other gun and vehicle crimes lately, the community is lucky the results weren’t completely different.

“This PBOPC meeting would have been very different today, had the circumstance not been handled the way it was,” she said. “Our members and that youth, along with the surrounding community members could have had a very different experience on Friday.”

It was fortunate that the canine unit was available along with officers who made difficult choices while pursuing the teen, who had been reported carrying the gun and who also attempted to pull it out of his pants while being chased on foot down the Rotary Trail.

After officers released the dog, it made contact with the teen who still did not co-operate, so they then used their Conducted Energy Weapon.

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“We were fortunate to have multiple police officers there who are making very difficult decision in the heat of the moment,” said Prince. “One of the biggest and most difficult decisions a police officer could have to make in their career is whether or not to use lethal force.”

In this case, officers chose not to, something the youth and his family are likely grateful for, but Prince is still left wondering about how the situation came to be in the first place.

Police will look back at incidents and examine their own decision making to see if changes need to be made but people more connected to the youth could also have made a difference.

“At what point do we look at what the action of the youth and the community should have and could have been?” she said. That can be parents, grandparents, spouses, friends or whoever knows the person is in the process of committing a crime.

In this case, the teen could have been shot and killed by officers so family members not calling police out of loyalty would have missed an opportunity to save his life.

Prince Albert officers have shot and killed people in the past in very similar circumstances, such as the death of Johnathan Gardiner in early 2023.

Gardiner was running from police on foot and the pursuing officer saw him pull something from a bag and shot him fatally. He turned out to be carrying a sawed off .22 rifle and replica handgun.

READ MORE: Man shot by police had guns, ammo in backpack

Police Commission members received data Tuesday morning that shows how prevalent it has become for suspects to attempt to avoid being arrested especially while driving and the situations are almost always a risk to the public, officers or the offenders themselves.

A graph of failure to stop incidents in Prince Albert over three years. (Prince Albert Police Commission agenda)

Usually, the offender is driving a car they do not own and often there are guns or drugs in the vehicle.

PA Police first noticed a change in 2023 when offenders failed to stop 438 times, well over two times the rate in 2022. 2024 was almost 40 per cent lower than the peak in 2023 but still remains higher than normal.

When the offender is in a vehicle and refuses to comply with police direction to stop, the situation becomes even more dangerous.

One study with a small sample size of 25 offenders showed that if criminals are driving a stolen vehicle, they will try to avoid capture 100 per cent of the time.

“Further, their attempts will result in either a successful evasion of capture or will result in their arrest usually following a crash or inoperability of a vehicle,” reads the agenda report.

In the interest of public safety, Chief Patrick Nogier said that officers usually choose or are directed to stop the chase unless the situation is too dangerous.

That was the case recently where police in the city were called to an incident in the West Flat where four people got out of a vehicle and shot at a house before getting back in and driving off.

The driver did not stop when police attempted to pull them over and headed north out of the city into RCMP jurisdiction.

After RCMP officers joined the chase, the crime vehicle turned around and the occupants began shooting at police, driving back through the city when they were boxed in, stopped and arrested. Police found a sawed off .22 rifle, knives, a machete, bear spray and drugs.

The trend is disturbing to officers like Deputy Chief Prince, who would like people who know the offenders to see the bigger picture.

“The call out from our organization to the community is you know, to have some reflection on what the community responsibility is for not enabling the behaviour. I understand there’s fear, fear of retaliation, perhaps fear of gang affiliation, perhaps fear of having to take on extra responsibility if somebody is held accountable,” she said.

“But look at the consequences of not taking the responsibility and preventing. Across the country, there are innocent people who are dying because somebody fails to stop for police.”

The situation is not isolated to Prince Albert. Police across Saskatchewan and in other parts of Canada have noticed a similar trend.

Within the city, though, the West Flat has the highest number of occurrences with 32 per cent of the total incidents while the remainder tend to be mainly on primary streets where the driver has a direct route of out town.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com

On BlueSky: @susanmcneil.bsky.social.