Alternative response officers: investing in policing alternatives and community safety in Saskatoon, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The current demand for policing alternatives has never been higher. In Canada, police services are increasingly exploring these alternatives to address this demand. In 2021, the Saskatoon Police Service (SPS), in collaboration with the city of Saskatoon, university partners, and numerous community stakeholders, introduced an alternative response officer (ARO). The ARO is a special constable, meaning that they are sworn in as a peace officer, but are tasked with addressing community safety concerns that do not require an armed officer to attend. SPS introduced the ARO in the downtown area of Saskatoon with the intent to increase interoperability with other community service providers, increase uniformed presence in the area to act as reassurance and deterrence, and to decrease the need for armed officers to attend low-level social disorder or social welfare calls. Using activity counts and calls for service data, this study examines the implementation and early outcomes of policing alternatives for community support and policing resource management. This study has implications for investing and expanding policing alternatives and reducing policing costs to municipalities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".