Helping to ensure the welfare of those living on Nanaimo streets has been a primary focus for the City's community safety officers, who are facing extremely high levels of calls for service. (File photo/NanaimoNewsNOW)

By Alex Rawnsley

front lines

‘They’ve saved a lot of lives:’ Nanaimo CSOs seeing high volume of calls for service

Apr 10, 2025 | 4:04 PM

NANAIMO — Having just wrapped their second full year of operation, calls for service to the City’s Community Safety Officers continue to flood in.

New data presented Wednesday, April 9 showed the unit received 7,832 requests for help throughout all of 2024, with a vast majority devoted to ensuring the safety and wellbeing of those living without permanent shelter.

Dave Laberge, City director of public safety, said the focus of the team is to be a point of contact primarily in Nanaimo’s downtown core.

“There’s much less emphasis in the work on the investigation or enforcement of regulatory bylaws, it’s more providing supports to vulnerable citizens. They’re often the first responders to overdose events, and they provide a lot of support to Island Health’s service providers.”

Medical situations accounted for a lot of their time last year.

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Officers conducted 1,482 “check welfare” calls, and provided hundreds of potentially life-saving doses of Naloxone to help those at risk of a fatal overdose.

“The CSOs administered 1,292 units of Naloxone in overdose events last year, and they performed life-saving CPR in 148 cases. They’re often finding folks in very remote areas that otherwise would that wouldn’t have been checked so they’ve saved a lot of lives.”

Laberge said they’re also being forced to give more doses of Naloxone now, upwards of eight or 10 per event, in order to revive someone than in years past due to the combination and potency levels of illicit street drugs.

Calls for service through 2024 ranged wildly for Community Safety Officers in Nanaimo, handling a wide array of situations. (NanaimoNewsNOW Graphic)

Newly acquired federal grant money will help expand the CSOs medical impact.

Laberge said delivery of new electric vehicles is expected this summer, with the cars to be equipped with an AED (automated external defibrillator), oxygen therapy and other medical supplies to speed response in overdose-related emergencies.

Overall coverage of the program is also growing in 2025.

Funding for five new CSOs and a senior officer, effective April 1, was included in the City’s budget, as were four additional hires for April 1, 2026.

“Our CSOs, you could call them an outreach team, and their presence is far more prominent on the streets than any of the other outreach teams,” Laberge said. “They work seven days a week, 16 hours a day, and when we enhance the teams, we’ll probably bump that up to 21 hours a day so a great deal of contacts downtown.”

Nanaimo’s CSO program was approved in April 2022 through the City’s Downtown Nanaimo Safety Action Plan and started the following fall.

Twelve officers were added at a cost of roughly $2.5 million per year, a price tag which also included other initiatives to improve safety and security in the downtown core.

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