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Keith Wyenberg was at City Hall Station waiting for the CTrain one night when a stranger approached him and changed his view of downtown Calgary.
It was a typical Wednesday evening for the retired math teacher and longtime member of the Calgary Philharmonic Chorus. Wyenberg has been going to choir practice downtown every week since 1983, the same year the Saddledome opened. For years, he drove to rehearsals from his Coach Hill home, but when the Blue Line expanded west, he started using public transit instead.
“I could take the train from 69th Street and down. So I started doing that,” said Wyenberg. “I could get a seniors’ pass. So I thought, yeah, it’s cheaper than parking.”
Then something happened, and it scared Wyenberg. As he stood waiting for his train, a man he didn’t know walked up to him.
“Give me a cigarette,” the man said.
“Sorry, I don’t smoke,” Wyenberg told him.
The man got angry, Wyenberg recounted.
“You’re lying!” he shouted.
Wyenberg was rattled. He had already started feeling uneasy in the core and after this incident, he’d had enough. He stopped taking the train and started driving again.
Keith Wyenberg stopped taking the CTrain downtown after he was intimidated by a stranger at the City Hall station. He spoke with CBC News at a pop-up discussion on safety at the Signal Hill library branch. (Elizabeth Withey/CBC)
The 82-year-old shakes his head, recalling the incident.
“It’s just intimidating,” he said. “During the day, it’s never been a problem. But at night right now, in the last few years, I just haven’t felt too safe being downtown.”
Wyenberg isn’t alone. Public safety is a major talking point in Calgary, and our sense of safety is dropping. A 2024 Illumina Research Partners study, commissioned for the Calgary Police Commission, interviewed 1,000 Calgarians to assess perceptions of safety. It found that in the 10-year period before the pandemic, about 95 per cent of residents said the city was a safe place to live. By 2022, that number was 85 per cent.
Perceptions of safety have fallen
“It is a significant percentage-point drop,” said Yvonne Brouwers with Illumina.
Perceptions of public safety slipped, in part, because of what Brouwers calls “a shift in context” at the end of the pandemic. After years of lockdowns, social distancing and remote work, people weren’t used to seeing so much social disorder in their day-to-day life.
It’s also because a lot of people moved to Calgary, according to Brouwers, many of them wooed here by the Alberta is Calling campaign. Between April 2023 and April 2024 alone, Calgary’s population ballooned by five per cent to 1,491,900 residents. The city calls it “one of the most significant annual population increases in Calgary’s history.”
The population spike strained emergency services, increased rents and made social disorder more visible in public spaces and on transit, according to Illumina, which in turn made residents feel less safe.
“So people can see it, and they have a lot of concern about it,” Angela Storozuk with Illumina said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about these people, about their behaviour.”
A man smokes on a crowded CTrain platform in downtown Calgary in April 2026. (Elizabeth Withey/CBC)
Calgary Police Supt. Scott Boyd described social disorder this way: “It’s the person that’s yelling to themselves or maybe to a friend, talking nonsensical in public spaces, or maybe even, you know, lunging at somebody at a distance that just makes people feel unsafe. Or they’re lying out on a bench or on a transit seat.”
Wyenberg’s experience of being shouted at by a stranger at a train station is an example of this. Police track reports of this kind separately from crime statistics and compile them in what’s known as the Disorder Index.
“Disorder calls for service are typically not crimes but are nevertheless situations that make Calgarians feel unsafe,” it notes in the 2025 Crime Report, presented to the police commission on March 26. Examples include an unwanted guest, a suspicious person, a disturbance, a suspicious vehicle or a mental health concern.
Last year, Calgary police got 81,953 calls about disorder. That’s about 224 calls a day.
The number is down slightly (four per cent) compared to the five-year average, partly because patrol officers are attending to disorder issues themselves, before a business or member of the public puts in a call. “Increases in officer-generated proactive calls for service can off-set public calls for service, where police proactively intervene and/or prevent issues,” notes the 2025 Crime Report.
Disorder is particularly pronounced in the core, where high-profile services for vulnerable populations, including the Calgary Drop-In Centre and the supervised drug consumption site inside the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre, coexist with head offices and Calgary nightlife. Calls to police from the public about disorder downtown reached a six-year high in 2025, nearly 17 per cent above the five-year average.
Boyd says the reason those calls have gone up is partly a “super potent” drug supply.
But it’s also what people are willing to put up with.
“I think another part of it is just community tolerance,” he said. “We’ve come out of COVID, and people are getting back to as much of a normal routine as they possibly can and are just honestly sick and tired of some of the stuff that they’re seeing in the places that they want to be with their family or friends, and are calling police more often.”
Regardless of risk, the fear and social discomfort is real, and it’s keeping people away from transit and public places.
And not just downtown.
Safety issues spread to the suburbs
Kim Amelia had a terrifying incident outside a grocery store last fall. Amelia had just parked at the Safeway in Marlborough and was grabbing reusable bags from the back of her car when she heard a noise.
She turned to see a man with a two-metre-long steel pole raised over his head like a bat, running full torque toward her.
Amelia says she ran as fast as she could inside the Safeway and hid behind the security guards in the foyer. The man with the pole wasn’t far behind her. He smashed the Safeway doors, then left.
Kim Amelia was chased by a man with a pole in a Safeway parking lot at Marlborough Mall. She spoke with CBC News at the Village Square library branch in northeast Calgary. (Elizabeth Withey/CBC)
The incident has made Amelia frightened to interact with people in the community. The 67-year-old Dover resident won’t walk her dogs at night anymore and doesn’t like to leave the house alone.
“I’m paranoid now. It doesn’t matter who approaches me and why they’re approaching me, I do not trust,” she said.
“It ends up affecting everyone — your and everyone’s abilities to connect with other people.”
Crime down overall, but violent crime has increased
Overall, Calgary’s crime numbers are trending down. But that’s because property crime has decreased in recent years. Violent crime, including assaults, is up significantly, according to the 2025 Crime Report. It rose four per cent between 2024 and 2025, and is up 16 per cent compared to the five-year average.
Storozuk from Illumina also says perceptions of safety lag behind reported incidents of violent crime. When you experience a crime or hear about a crime in the news, it affects your sense of safety and your choices. And that doesn’t go away overnight.
“Just because a crime stat went down and there hasn’t been all of these crimes anymore, it takes a while for citizens to feel that and be confident that that’s truly the case,” said Storozuk.
Police are making an increased effort to combat crime and disorder, and boost people’s sense of public safety. In recent months, the Calgary Police Service has done two full-day policing blitzes in priority areas like East Village, Stephen Avenue and Century Gardens. At the first Operation Order in November, they arrested 20 people, executed 180 outstanding warrants and seized several weapons. They also referred more than 60 vulnerable Calgarians to social services. During the February blitz, police arrested nine more people, executed 133 warrants, and made a further 132 social agency referrals.
CPS is planning to expand Operation Order to other parts of the city this year.
WATCH | Why enforcement sweeps are unlikely to fix Calgary’s downtown disorder:
Can enforcement sweeps fix downtown disorder?
Calgary police have been carrying out enforcement sweeps downtown in what they say is an effort to improve public safety. But as CBC’s Jo Horwood reports, the sweeps aren’t a complete solution to the complicated problem of rising disorder downtown.
In a poll conducted ahead of last fall’s municipal election, residents ranked “improving public safety and reducing crime” as one of the top three issues for the City of Calgary over the next four years.
Safety has become a top priority
Pollster Janet Brown says Calgarians have always wanted a safe city. But, she says, residents have traditionally wanted city hall to focus on infrastructure, along with economic issues like taxation and responsible spending. Now, they’ve put public safety at the top of the priority list.
“It’s no longer a secondary concern. It’s a top concern,” Brown said.
Jeromy Farkas, who won Calgary’s mayoral race last fall, released 25 commitments related to public safety during his campaign. He reiterated the need to focus on public safety at the Calgary Police Commission’s March meeting, saying resident are asking for a city that’s safe and compassionate.
“Calgarians have made it very clear that public safety is one of their top priorities, and it’s up to all of us to listen, to hear those concerns and to act — to pursue meaningful, long-term solutions that address both crime and the root causes behind it.”
Now there are more changes afoot.
Province will close drug consumption site
The province announced in March the supervised drug consumption site at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre downtown will close on June 30, a decision that Alberta’s Mental Health and Addiction Minister Rick Wilson says is primarily based on the government’s commitment to focus on “recovery” instead of “harm reduction.”
Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services Mike Ellis said at the announcement the government is treating addiction “like the health care issue that it is.”
But even at that announcement, attention quickly turned to social disorder. The Chumir is often blamed for being a hub or attractant of disorder in the Beltline.
Security staff patrol the area outside the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre in Calgary’s downtown, where a supervised consumption site has been operating for years. (CBC)
The existing Safeworks Connect team, which does harm reduction work in the area, will also be shut down by the end of June. But Ellis promised a new street team will keep the area feeling safe, while also watching out for drug users who need help.
“We’re also making sure we have the boots on the ground, which is making sure we have police in the communities to provide not just the visible support for the people within the community that have a right to walk down the street and not inhale secondhand crystal meth smoke, or to walk down the street and not see somebody passed out,” he said, “we want to be able to help those people and get them the medical treatments that of course they need and of course that they deserve.”
Recovery Alberta oversees the supervised consumption site. In a statement, officials said it remains “committed to maintaining safe neighbourhoods,” but any questions about public disorder should be directed to law enforcement or the city.
There are concerns the closure of the supervised drug consumption site could increase social disorder by moving more drugs into public spaces, and put people at risk of overdosing alone or in public.
“The big question now is where do they go, where do they use?” said Dr. Monty Ghosh, an additions doctor who regularly works at the Chumir.
“If they’re using alone, they’re at a higher risk of having an overdose event. If they’re using in public, that could potentially cause more public disruption, more public anger, which might not be ideal either,” he said in an interview with CBC Radio’s The Homestretch.
“I’m worried about the situation in terms of the safety of the clients, but also the potential disruption or visible public use that this might cause.”
This article is part of a four-part series on the impact of crime and social disorder in Calgary. Read the full series and share your thoughts at cbc.ca/yycsafety.
