Saskatoon police warrant squad targets violent offenders in wake of James Smith stabbings

WATCH: The Saskatoon Police Service (SPS) has introduced a new warrant enforcement unit to tackle outstanding criminal code warrants in the city.

The Saskatoon police say warrant enforcement efforts developed in the wake of mass stabbings in James Smith Cree Nation are helping manage violent offenders in the city.

Last year, a coroner’s inquest into Myles Sanderson’s brutal killing spree in James Smith and the nearby village of Weldon recommended an expansion of warrant enforcement teams and changes to their risk assessment so that repeat domestic violence offenders were made a higher priority.

The inquest had heard Sanderson broke the conditions of his supervised release prior to the killings. With a warrant out for his arrest, Sanderson was living in a Saskatoon apartment with the mother of his children — a place he was widely known to frequent.

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Now, in a report before Saskatoon’s board of police commissioners on Thursday, Patrol Superintendent Tanya Gresty says the high-level warrant enforcement unit (WEU) created in response to that inquest has accelerated the prosecution of violent offenders and reinforced public safety.

“These are individuals who do not want to be found by police and who continue to pose harm to the community while at large,” Gresty writes.

“Targets are not selected from a static list but are identified through ongoing intelligence and information-sharing, including parade bulletins, internal emails, and collaboration with partners in policing and corrections such as Parole Officers, as well as other police agencies including Prince Albert Police Service, Regina Police Service, Calgary Police Service, Edmonton Police Service, and the RCMP.”

The report says the unit, comprised of four senior, experienced officers, aims to act as a support to patrol officers without drawing from its personnel.

Among the challenges of faced by the new unit, according the report: a glut of outstanding criminal code warrants, some of which had sat so long the charges may no longer be prosecutable.

“The WEU began its work with a total of 2,100 Criminal Code warrants, many of which had already exceeded the R. v. Jordan threshold,” Gresty said.

Under the criminal code, anyone charged with an offence has a right to be tried within a reasonable time. What constitutes “a reasonable time” was laid out by the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of R. v. Jordan.

“At the heart of this new framework is a presumptive ceiling beyond which delay — from the charge to the actual or anticipated end of trial — is presumed to be unreasonable, unless exceptional circumstances justify it. The presumptive ceiling is 18 months for cases tried in the provincial court, and 30 months for cases in the superior court,” Justice Thomas Cromwell wrote in his 2016 opinion.

The time limit on prosecution set out in R. v. Jordan was meant to speed up the administration of justice and to protect the rights of people accused of a crime who, it should be said, may not be guilty.

It has also been contentious for the victims of crimes when it has prevented a trial from proceeding, as in the high-profile impaired driving case of Taylor Kennedy, who struck and killed nine-year-old Baeleigh Maurice at a Saskatoon crosswalk in 2021.

The Crown has appealed the stay of proceedings in Kennedy’s case, and the court is expected to decide whether it will go back to trial in a few months.

Given the high number of outstanding warrants faced by Saskatoon’s new enforcement unit, it’s clear delays in prosecution sometimes come long before a case is heard in court.

To date, Gresty says the WEU has actively investigated 2,168 offenders, ranking them on a tiered scale of one to 10 based on the severity of alleged offence and the history of the offenders.

“As a result of these targeted efforts, 354 warrants have been executed, leading to 257 arrests. Of those, 79 were drawn directly from the violent offence and violent offender list, while 178 arrests stemmed from weekly warrant threat assessments.”

A one-year program review for the unit is expected in 2026, police say. The review will assess progress toward public safety goals, warrant reduction and procedural justice benchmarks.