Frontline police in Saskatchewan will soon have access to high-powered, semi-automatic carbine rifles. While this move is aimed at increasing police safety, statistics suggest that the weapons will do more harm than good.

On July 16 of this year, the Saskatchewan government approved frontline officers in municipal departments to carry and use short barrelled heavy-duty carbine rifles. Police associations have been calling for these weapons as a result of police shootings and confrontations where suspects were better armed than police.

However, Statistics Canada reports that homicides against police officers have gone down in Canada exponentially since the 1960s and even since 2005. Arming our police officers with these heavy-duty guns is not the best decision for our province.

One-third of all murdered officers in Canada were relatively new to the job, being an average age of 34-years-old at the time of death and having been with their present police service for five years or less.

Due to this, perhaps we should be focusing on providing better training for our police officers and using caution when sending someone relatively new to the line of duty into dangerous situations like armed robberies — where the majority of the homicides against police officers are reported to occur.

Statistics Canada also reports police officers have most commonly been killed with a firearm. Although this is one of the reasons why police associations are advocating for arming officers with these carbine rifles, it fails to take into account that most police officers killed in the line of duty do not even have the opportunity to draw their weapon or defend themselves in any way. This means that more often than not, these shootings were unexpected attacks. Even if these officers were heavier armed, it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.

Arming our police officers with carbine rifles also directly affects students, as police organizations have historically had a rocky relationship with university populations.

Although, in a 2010 journal article by Henry Chow — professor of sociology and social studies at the University of Regina — it was reported that the attitudes of university students towards police officers in Western Canada have been moderately positive in recent years.

However, Chow also stresses the importance of reducing adversarial interaction between young adults and the police by “avoiding overly aggressive enforcement and by treating young people with fairness and respect.” I highly doubt that arming our police officers with these large, intimidating guns is going to help with police-student relations.

I personally would feel more hesitant to approach a police officer if they were carrying this kind of weapon, as heavily armed officers tend to look more like soldiers than police. This further militarization of our police officers is not going to help anything and could even increase the cases of police brutality and civilian shootings.

I propose that the best course of action to take is to better protect our police officers, not with heavier weaponry but with better protective body armour and more widespread use of this equipment.

As reported by Statistics Canada, in all police homicides, nearly eight in 10 officers were not wearing protective body armor, such as bullet proof vests, at the time of the shooting. If we increased our education and training of officers and provided them with more protective equipment, we would have no need for these intimidating rifles that will ultimately do more harm than good.

Guns should never be the only option for protection.

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Kay-Lynne Collier