Living downtown in Calgary, I often see police patrols on bikes, particularly on the central parts of the Bow Trail and busy corridors like 5 Steet between the Elbow and the Bow Rivers. After seeing a posse of eight officers riding past my apartment the other day, I was intrigued to find out more about police using bicycles, especially as I had a family connection to police patrolling by bicycle.
My father was a police constable in a village in England in the 1960’s and 70’s. His only vehicle in the early years was a black Raliegh 3-speed pedal bike that was kept in a small shed attached to the back of the police station where my family lived. His days on duty entailed cycling to different rendezvous locations around the village that his Seargeant set up by telephone. The Sargeant would then drive to the location that was known as a “Point”. This type of patrolling was called “Point Duty”. As the village covered some 7km by 6km, the distance my father cycled kept him very fit.
Sadly, this all changed when the police first received Triumph Thunderbird motorbikes and then, in the late 1960’s, they migrated to cars. Very soon after, policing in England became centralized on a hub town. This resulted in village police stations becoming redundant and so most were sold off, to police families like ours in the first instance.
I have fond memories of this period but as I was too young, I have no photos. The picture below is typical of what I recall. I remember trying to ride my father’s bike, when I was much too small, and falling foul of the high crossbar!
When you look at the history of police on bikes both in England and in Canada you find they were introduced fairly soon after the invention of a practical bicycle in the 1880’s. The Edmonton police service began in 1890s with just ”two constables, a bicycle, and two whistles”. The Calgary Police Service had been set up a few years earlier than Edmonton’s and it too started with just two Constables. Whether they too had to share a bicycle I couldn’t discover.
Police in Calgary introduced Harley Davison motorbikes in the early 1920’s and gradually the police bicycle inventory disappeared here across Canada and in the UK. It wasn’t until the 1980’s when the idea of community policing on bikes was reintroduced. By then it was realized that isolating police in cars and on motorbikes didn’t make them approachable to the public. In Canada, Edmonton but Calgary and other cities weren’t far behind.
Nowadays, several police districts in Calgary mount bike patrols. They’ve tried fat bikes in winter and mountain bikes for Fish Creek Park and have previously stated that their cycle patrols are 12 months of the year. So far I’ve only seen them on the pathways in summer but I welcome your observations of bike police in the city.
Sources:
https://www.edmontonpolice.ca/AboutEPS/HistoryOfTheEPS
Calgary Police Service – Wikipedia