Lexi Saldaña
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Daily Herald
Community members, local businesses, and government officials attended the Chamber of Commerce’s 2026 Luncheon Series with Chief of Police Patrick Nogier at the Coronet Hotel Thursday afternoon.
Accompanied by a banquet, attendees were presented the opportunity to hear directly from Prince Albert Police Service Chief Patrick Nogier, who spoke about current priorities, community safety, and law enforcement initiatives, of which included a look into their firearm strategy.
“Prince Albert is on the map and Prince Albert seems to be a place where people want to come live, work, and play,” said Nogier. “That’s a very important concept as we talk today about what’s the future of Prince Albert as it pertains to public safety. The things that are of concern to you are not things that we’re shuffling to the back of the deck.”
Nogier provided an update on the strategy, stating that, “it is something that we started about a few years ago.”
“The prevalence of firearms in our community is concerning at a national level. There’s a lot of discussion about what this firearms legislation means, for we have a federal government now that’s pushing for gun legislation to take guns away from law-abiding gun owners,” explained Nogier. “Those that use firearms for hunting, sustenance, sport shooting, those aren’t the ones causing issues in our communities.”
Nogier detailed their findings, presenting data from 2025.
“This is what we experienced last year—51 firearm-related incidents, 58 crime guns were taken off the streets, 63 imitation firearms, 28 discharged incidents, and 28 trigger pulls,” said Nogier.
As for this year, Nogier noted a “nice little reduction.”
“43 firearm-related incidents, 39 crime guns seized, 22 imitation firearms, and 20 firearm discharge incidents,” he said. “So not a substantial scale, one’s too many when it’s being used in that fashion. 36 individuals charged—we’re going to charge people that carry firearms and use firearms for victimization in our community.”
Nogier further explained that the service has “one of the best relationships with Saskatchewan Firearms Office,” sharing respect towards the organization’s ability in handling ballistics and laboratory, as well as elaborating on how efficient law enforcement can be due to coordinated efforts
“This gets us into a discussion about IBIS and CIBIN. IBIS stands for Integrated Ballistic Identification System—not new technology. It has been around for a decade or so and it’s been utilized heavily in the United States, but the uptick in using it in Canada has been slow until now,” he said. “When we formed alliances with the provincial government, we said, ‘Listen, is there an opportunity to invest in this area?’ We got support from our provincial government. And now we’ve got this capability for the products. No organization, whether it be the RCMP, Saskatoon, or Regina, or Prince Albert, had the ability to invest in both people and product to get this where it needed to be. But it is now where it needs to be.”
Furthermore, the service has been able to apply CIBIN, abbreviation for Canadian Integrated Ballistics Identification Network, a forensic database and network used by police in order to track and connect ballistic evidence from gun crimes.
“If you take a gun, any gun, and I pull the trigger, there’s going to be a casing that comes out of it. When that casing comes out of that gun, the striations on it from where the actual casing was hit, and when it was extracted from the receiver, those will be unique as a fingerprint,” explained Nogier. “The Canadian Ballistics Identification Network means that you can make connections to firearms in communities.”
In June of 2026, as explained by Nogier, a business had been victim to a drive-by shooting, where casing were retrieved by the service’s forensic identification team. Following this, the provincial lab analyzed the evidence, placing its footprint into the Canadian database.
“The shell casings are associated with a call in Surrey, BC. Within a span of one month, Surrey, B.C, a vehicle is pulled over. The vehicle has four individuals in it, they’re pulled out, and they have a gun in it. [They take] that firearm to the lab, pulls the trigger, takes the casing out—the casing has a fingerprint from that gun. Guess who it was associated to? Prince Albert, Saskatchewan,” he said.
Upon that finding, four individuals were subject to an investigation.
In addition, shootings in Edmonton and Strathcona, Alberta, and Peel Region, Ontario were traced back to the same gun.
“We’re now coordinating our efforts with those different agencies. We’ve got suspects. Information that we’re learning now is that these individuals are associated to a group of individuals in Canada, were identified as a terrorist group in September of 2025,” he said.
When asked about whether investigators were able to identify if the firearm was legal or came across the border, Nogier said that “it comes back to the tracing.”
“We do the ballistics component on the faces of the gun, but there’s also a tracing component of how the gun came into Canada. We do not have the ability to do a full tracing program on guns as a municipality. We don’t have the ability to expand into those areas, but the RCMP do, and they do,” he said. “The mandate of the Canadian Firearms program isn’t just about regulation of individuals that have guns within our guns. It’s actually how guns are coming in for those efforts that are built into this on the back end to try and determine—can we say, ‘Mr. Trump, your guns are causing harm in our community?’ We’re developing for the case to say that.”
Concluding the luncheon, Police Chief Patrick Nogier closed the event with the clear message that the Prince Albert Police Service are tightening its focus regarding firearms-related crimes, strengthening interprovincial partnerships and utilizing advanced ballistic technology in order to connect offenders in the country—all while emphasizing lawful gun owners are not the issue.
