Police say about 75 people commit an inordinate amount of crime in Calgary. Who are they?

It’s a statistic floated around by high-ranking police officers and Calgary’s new mayor — a relatively small number of people committing a whole lot of crime.

Ahead of a Calgary police downtown safety blitz Nov. 5, Supt. Scott Boyd said the police have a “high system user group that’s roughly around 75 individuals ... [who] do a disproportionate amount of crime on any given day throughout Calgary."

During his campaign, then-mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas used a slightly different number, pledging in his platform to “strengthen community policing with a crackdown on Calgary’s top 100 repeat violent offenders.”

But who are they?

“High system user is a term that we have coined for individuals who statistically and factually have initiated literally hundreds of calls for service based on social disorder and crime-related behaviour,” said Insp. Jason Bobrowich.

“There really isn't a particular profile of a person. It's totally based on behaviour patterns that we have identified … [we’ve] seen them perpetually going through the criminal justice system and repeating the cycles."

As for what types of crimes or disturbances they might be committing, Bobrowich said it runs the gamut from public intoxication or illicit drug use, to theft or possession of stolen property, all the way up to more serious crimes like assault or assault with a weapon. 

During the downtown blitz, officers roamed streets, making arrests, issuing tickets and referring individuals in need to services intended to help them.

Bobrowich said officers were not specifically looking for the habitual offenders, but the patrols did occur in areas where they might be.

As an example, police said in a media release they received reports of a convenience store robbery during the downtown blitz. Officers arrested a suspect who is a so-called high system user and was allegedly in breach of his bail conditions.

The notion that many offences are committed by a small group of offenders is not new, but rather conventional wisdom in the field of criminology, according to Doug King, a criminal justice professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

“They tend to not just repeat, but they tend to repeat more often,” King said.

"So they might make out maybe 25 per cent of the crimes that are committed, and they are about 10 per cent of the offender population."

Conversely, he said the opposite tends to hold true — that the majority of people who commit a crime will not reoffend.