Saskatoon police podcast raises questions about transparency and how authorities share data

Saskatoon police say it was barely a week before they started suspecting Kandice Singbeil's disappearance was more than just a missing person file.

Singbeil was last seen in the city's downtown in May 2015. Investigators were speaking with her boyfriend soon after.

"Halfway through that interview, there's red flags coming up to me. So, she's been missing for about a week or just over a week now," Det. Sgt. Kevin Montgomery said in an interview.

"They are homeless, they are involved with drugs, there is talk about a drug debt, and there's also some domestic violence between the two of them. So, there's several factors here that are way, way more, I guess, than your regular missing person file."

Montgomery's comments are unusual for two reasons.

First, it's not typical for Saskatoon police investigators to speak in such specific detail about a missing person. Elements such as drugs or domestic violence are usually referred to under the broad umbrella of a person's involvement in "a high-risk lifestyle."

Second, it's where Montgomery made the comments. They were not in an interview with a media outlet. They didn't come out of an exchange with reporters at a news conference. They were not in a social media post.

Rather, they were made to members of the police communications team and used in a five-part podcast exploring Singbeil's disappearance and the ensuing police investigation. Deals, Debts, & Death is the first such podcast produced and released by the Saskatoon police.

Producing an in-house podcast is a gambit that University of Saskatchewan sociology professor Julie Kaye said raises its own red flags.

"We only have access to the information that they're willing to release," she said.

"I was curious about this coming from the police."

An investigative tool: police

Cameron McBride is the police force's deputy chief and signed off on the podcast. He said the communications team began working with investigators on the podcast in September 2023.

McBride said it had one objective.

"At its core, we want this podcast to solve the missing person file," he said.

"It's not a file, actually. It's a person, a loved one. And that's the heart and soul behind the podcast — that Kandice deserves to come home."

Deputy chief Cameron McBride says the true measure of success for the podcast will be whether it leads to any new information coming in. (CBC)

The podcast features interviews with Singbeil's mother Pauline, a host of police missing person and major crimes investigators, and another a woman who also lived a high-risk lifestyle.

It also has a photo gallery with pictures of Kandice, where she went missing, her bicycle and police searching the city landfill.

One episode has a major crimes investigators taking listeners on a guided tour of the Traveller's Block, the downtown building where Singbeil was last seen. This led to a discussion of a rumoured network of tunnels beneath the downtown.

It also explains why police spent three days searching the landfill.

"One of those [surveillance] videos included a view in the back alley behind the Traveller's Block. And, at one point during that week, we became aware of a person in the back alley appearing to carry something large in a white sheet… And throw it into a dumpster," major crimes investigator Tyson Lavallee said.

"If there was any possibility that Kandice was under that sheet, investigators soon realized … they're going to have to search a landfill."

Police spent three days searching the city landfill. (Saskatoon Police Service)

McBride said police used in-house resources to produce the podcast, with the final bill totalling about $1,000. Since its release just before Christmas, it has tallied more than 27,000 downloads — 14,000 of those in Saskatchewan.

"At the end of the day, the downloads are a confirmation that we have a good product," McBride said.

"But really, the success is going to be determined in whether or not we get investigative leads that allow the investigation to progress."

'Guarded with their data': sociologist

In addition to teaching sociology at the U of S, Julie Kaye is also academic co-ordinator of the Certificate in Criminology and Addictions program.

She said one of the positives of the podcast is that it could help break the silence around Singbeil's disappearance, and prompt someone to come forward and share information.

But Kaye has concerns about why police decided to release information critical to an ongoing investigation in such a manner. There are other ways to get the material into the public eye, "say through media, social media, through all sorts of different ways of sharing this information."

Julie Kaye says the police podcast raises questions. (Julie Kaye)

Kaye said the issues around the police doing a podcast become clearer when it's looked at in a wider context, such as how historically police have dealt with missing and murdered Indigenous women, and how police have dealt with female complainants.

In the Singbeil podcast, police are completely controlling the flow of information and how it's presented. The podcast portrays the officers as hard-working, compassionate, responsive and diligent. Kaye said this may well be the case here, but it's not always the case.

Making themselves "the hero of their own story" is problematic, she said.

"This does a disservice to honour the women who have expressed their experiences of not being heard," she said.

"It also raised questions for me around, you know, the area of domestic violence. Because we know from from research that you know, women, particularly in the province as well, women report experiencing minimization, being outright ignored or sometimes completely dismissed by police when they make reports around, you know, around their experiences of violence."

While the podcast may shed light on what could have happened to Kandice Singbeil, there is little discussion in it about the police's own processes.

"The police also have an active role in how these situations continue to occur," she said.