The Saskatoon Police Service will present its budget asks for 2027 to the Board of Police Commissioners today.
Of the capital expenditures planned for 2027, 79 per cent relates to replacement of existing equipment. Some of the biggest costs include $751,000 for continued replacement of the radio equipment, $567,000 for required IT infrastructure replacement for the network and servers and $463,000 for additional fleet equipment expansion to accommodate additional police officers including an additional School Resource Officer. The total cost of capital projects is $3,852,000.
The police service points to the evolving public safety environment which has led to increased resource requests to deal with increasing service call volumes, crime severity, organizational risk and the need to support people within the Service. Calls for service have increased by 41 per cent between 2019 and 2025. This increase means that the SPS calls for service has increased from an average of 321 calls per day in 2019 to over 454 calls per day by 2025.
The police department says crime severity is also an indicator of the number of resources the police need to provide proper response. While the Saskatoon CMA’s Crime Severity Index has fallen from prior years – it remains well above the Canadian average. As well, Saskatchewan has consistently had a higher Violent Crime Severity Index than all of Canada in the past few years.
The report to the police commission says another indicator of the crime severity that officers face every day is the number of serious and common assaults. Assaults overall continue to grow in number, with 47 per cent of them categorized as serious assaults in 2025. There were 235 more serious assaults in 2025 than in 2024.
As well officers continue to encounter more weapons on their service calls. There has been a 78 per cent increase in weapon calls since 2019.
The Saskatoon Police Service is asking for a net operating budget for 2027 of $149,960,250. That equates to a 5.4 per cent increase over 2026 or $7.7 million more.
