Edmonton Police quietly deleted a controversial social media post after it triggered a wave of outrage.
But the system promoted in that post never went away.
The department’s online portal still invites people to file police reports over conduct that EPS explicitly acknowledges is not criminal—including name-calling and “offensive jokes.”
That distinction is the heart of the controversy.
EPS is not claiming that every ugly joke, insult, or slur violates Canada’s Criminal Code. It is doing something critics find nearly as troubling: creating an official police-reporting channel for lawful conduct and routing those reports to hate-crime investigators.
The department’s deleted X post, status ID 2083304279624810788, promoted the difference between a hate crime and what EPS calls a “hate incident.” Screenshots and quote-posts preserved the message after the original disappeared.
Ezra Levant zeroed in on the most explosive language in the policy:
It gets worse.
Without approval from Parliament, the @edmontonpolice have invented UK-style “non-criminal hate incidents” that they intend to police. Examples include “offensive jokes”.
The Edmonton Police themselves are an offensive joke. https://t.co/gJusUk1c1Y pic.twitter.com/TxIwnyzcvK
— Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 (@ezralevant) August 1, 2026
The language is not a critic’s paraphrase.
The live Edmonton Police Service page defines a hate-motivated incident as a “non-criminal action” against a person or property that is motivated in whole or in part by hate, bias, or prejudice toward an identifiable group.
EPS then lists verbal insults, name-calling, offensive jokes, and slurs among its examples.
Anyone submitting one of these reports receives an email with a police file number. The department says every hate-motivated incident filed through the online system is reviewed by Hate Crimes Unit investigators.
The identifiable-group definition covers race, national or ethnic origin, language, religion, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression, along with any similar factor. The wording gives the reporting category a deliberately broad reach across protected and comparable characteristics.
If a report initiates an investigation, the person who filed it may be contacted by an investigator.
The portal also permits someone to complete a report on another person’s behalf. EPS directs emergencies and incidents involving evidence that could be lost to its phone lines, but the non-criminal hate category remains available for immediate online submission.
That is far more than an anonymous community survey or a complaint box maintained by a private organization. It is a police record, reviewed inside a specialized investigative unit, concerning conduct the same department says falls below the threshold of a crime.
After EPS deleted its promotional post, Levant pointed out that removing the message did nothing to change the policy:
Looks like the Edmonton Police bravely deleted their tweet about prosecuting citizens for offensive jokes.
But just because some intern deleted a tweet doesn’t mean the police have actually abandoned their authoritarian censorship policy.
They haven’t apologized or retracted. https://t.co/yXhvo9W2vM
— Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 (@ezralevant) August 1, 2026
The portal has been operating for years.
Global News reported when EPS launched the expanded online system in June 2023. Police said the portal would give people who were uncomfortable calling or visiting a station another way to report incidents, including on behalf of someone else.
EPS argued that information from non-criminal reports could help officers identify patterns, understand hateful behavior around the city, and create opportunities for intervention before conduct escalated into a crime.
Supporters also said targeted insults and harassment can leave victims feeling unsafe, isolated, and pressured to hide their identity even when the conduct does not produce a criminal charge.
At launch, police emphasized that the portal could also help them decide whether a submission remained a non-criminal incident or crossed into a chargeable offense. Global News reported that EPS had recorded 13 hate crimes and 19 hate incidents in 2023 by the time the system was announced.
Those concerns are real. Threats, assaults, vandalism, and targeted intimidation deserve serious police attention.
But the portal deliberately reaches beyond those crimes.
The scale of that expansion is no longer theoretical.
An official Edmonton Police Commission presentation listed 227 hate-incident occurrences in 2025, compared with 128 in 2024—a 78.1 percent increase. The presentation was delivered by members of the EPS Hate Crimes Unit during the commission’s April 2026 public meeting.
Over the same period, recorded hate crimes fell from 83 to 60.
The commission’s five-year review also shows that non-criminal incident files have become a substantial part of the unit’s workload. EPS recorded 173 such occurrences in 2022, 111 in 2023, 128 in 2024, and then 227 in 2025.
The presentation separates these files from crimes such as assaults and property offenses. It also tracks the communities identified in both categories, placing the non-criminal reports inside the same official trend and victimology system used by the Hate Crimes Unit.
In other words, the fastest-growing category was not criminal violence, threats, or property damage. It was the category EPS itself labels non-criminal.
That is exactly why the deleted post caused such a fierce reaction.
Police can and should pursue actual crimes. They should also be honest about the line between criminal conduct and speech that is merely offensive.
Once lawful speech generates police file numbers, specialist review, and the possibility of investigative contact, the chilling effect is obvious—even if no charge is ever filed.
Deleting the X post may have lowered the temperature for a few hours.
It did not answer the central question: Why should police be building official files around conduct they admit is not a crime?
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