Acting Regina police chief talks drug smuggling and biometrics after incident report

People try to bring drugs into Regina police cells from time to time, but it’s not an epidemic, according to Acting Regina Police Chief Lorilee Davies.

“But certainly, people are creative in terms of how to get product into correctional facilities,” said Davies.

She was responding to a report on Tuesday, about a man who died while in Regina police custody in 2023. He turned himself in to police on warrants but later died of drug toxicity. He was found to have had six packages of meth and morphine in his body.

The Serious Incident Response Team (SIRT) report found it likely that the man had turned himself in to try to smuggle drugs into a correctional facility.

After this incident, Davies says the police sent out some internal information to raise awareness.

“To say ‘hey, if somebody turns themself in at the front desk on warrants make sure we’re doing our due diligence and doing all the things that we need to do to ensure that this isn’t a case where smuggling is likely the end game,’ just to make sure that we’re ensuring that their health is protected,” she explained.

Davies said there wasn’t much that could be changed when it comes to things like searches.

“There are strict parameters based on case law in terms of when you can strip search somebody or when you can take somebody to the hospital to be searched,” she said.

SIRT's investigation into an in-custody death that took place at the @reginapolice Detention Unit has concluded.

Public Report posted: https://t.co/HBWAHLoykx

— Serious Incident Response Team – Saskatchewan (@SIRT_SK) May 20, 2025

The biggest change for the Regina police from this incident was the installation of biometric monitoring in 10 of its 34 detention cells, according to Davies.

In all the cells, they do checks every 15 minutes, but Davies said the biometric system can monitor a person’s heart rate and respiration and signal if something has gone wrong.

“It’s able to detect sooner than a person walking by can detect if somebody’s in medical distress,” she said.

Davies said it’s been a valuable tool to make sure that people in police care are a lot safer, and said it’s made six saves for them, for sure, in terms of alerting someone so they can intervene and get someone to the hospital or use an AED.

“This biometrics is, I would say, that next level in terms of monitoring of our prisoners,” said Davies.

If the system had been installed when the man whose death SIRT was investigating went into medical distress, Davies said they likely would have been able to recognize it sooner, but she couldn’t say whether the outcome would have been any different.

The initial cost for the system was $50,000, and licensing for the monitoring system is about $1,000 a month for the ten cells.

Davies said the service is hoping to expand the system to all of its 34 cells eventually.

The acting chief said she was happy to see there wasn’t anything in the SIRT report that pointed back to a mistake by police. She said it would be easy to look back and say they should have suspected he was trying to smuggle drugs, but the report found the response was reasonable based on the information they had at the time.

Davies expressed sympathies for the man’s family, saying it probably felt like a long time waiting for the report.

“So our heart goes out to them. Anytime somebody does die in our custody, we take that very seriously. It is a tragedy and so we’re thinking about them on this day,” said Davies.

She also gave her thanks and support to all the police officers and workers involved.

“It’s traumatic for them as well, nobody wants to have felt like they maybe didn’t do enough, or could have done better, or could have done differently in this type of situation and so I think to see on a page, to say based on the totality of circumstances there probably wasn’t anything that you could have done differently. I think for our folks that will hopefully help them sleep a little easier at night,” said Davies.