Lifetime Award Recipients
Kathy Christiansen
2025 Lifetime Achievement in Community Policing
Kathy Christiansen has been with the Alpha House Society for almost 35 years, serving Calgary’s most vulnerable with grace, compassion, and determination. Under her leadership, Alpha House has become a national leader in helping law enforcement better support people in crisis.
Ms. Christiansen started discussions with the City of Calgary and Calgary Police Service in 2002 on how community impacts of public intoxication and homelessness could be better addressed. This eventually led to the creation of the Downtown Outreach Addiction Partnership, or DOAP Team.
The DOAP Team meant shelter staff from the Alpha House can respond to calls about drug use and homelessness, instead of the police or other first responders. Ms. Christiansen has since overseen the expansion of the DOAP Team (now called the HELP Team) from one van to a fleet of over 40 that operates 24/7 and compassionately transports people to needed supports over 20,000 times each year.
Ms. Christiansen has also formed other collaborative partnerships over her career. Alpha House now works as part of the City of Calgary’s Encampment Team where support workers attend camps alongside bylaw enforcement and the police. Alpha House staff also patrol C-Train platforms with Transit Peace Officers, remove over 64,000 used needles from public spaces each year, and help local businesses address incidents related to homelessness and substance abuse.
Ms. Christiansen has consistently been a collaborative partner to first responders, The City, and other community organizations. For decades, she has been an innovator and advocate, leading the way in partnerships between the police, public agencies, and the community to better respond to homelessness and addiction.
Sergeant Katherine Severson (Ret’d)
2025 Lifetime of Distinguished Service
Sergeant Katherine Severson retired from the Calgary Police Service in 2023 after serving for 26 years. She showed a commitment throughout her career to leadership, teaching, and improving policing.
She was exceptional from the start, winning the Bill Shelever Memorial Award for outstanding achievement during recruit training. She also twice received the Chief’s Award for Life Saving and consistently volunteered during her career to be a coach and instructor for other officers.
Sergeant Severson is most known though for her tremendous contributions to Calgary’s emergency management practices. She co-authored both the City of Calgary’s Mass Casualty Incident Protocol and Flood Evacuation Plan, ensuring there are multi-agency plans to quickly address large-scale emergencies. She was also instrumental in creating protocols for a Victim Reconciliation Taskforce, which enables Alberta Health Services, The City, the medical examiner, and the police to quickly work together to reunite loved ones. It later became the template for the rest of the province.
Between 2017 and 2019, Sergeant Severson created and provided live training on a new active shooter protocol for first responders. Before it, active shooter victims would have to wait until the police stopped the threat before receiving aid. Now, other emergency services can enter buildings with the police to immediately provide medical care while police officers work to stop a shooter.
Sergeant Severson has also been a longstanding volunteer member of Canada Task Force 2, through which she has been deployed to help manage disasters across western Canada. She is a go-to emergency management expert for many other agencies, is an active volunteer for several charities, and coaches youth soccer in her spare time.
Sergeant Paban Dhaliwal
2024 Lifetime of Distinguished Service
Sergeant Paban Dhaliwal has served as a police officer for 21 years and is known for his unwavering desire to positively influence the people around him. He has excelled in frontline policing, youth mentorship, community relations, and crime prevention.
While working as a School Resource Officer, he collaborated with teachers to develop both an afterschool South Asian dance program and a wrestling program at two different schools to give youth a positive activity to occupy their time in the critical hours after school. He also developed an annual community clean up program at Lester B. Pearson High School with community partners to instill a sense of community pride and service in the students he served.
Sergeant Dhaliwal has also shown a commitment over his career to help at-risk youth stay out of gangs and criminality. Through a partnership with YouthLink, he helped create anti-gang education for youth that is delivered both in the interpretive centre and through presentations in the community.
He has worked tirelessly throughout his career to build bridges between the police service and the diverse communities they serve, including organizing community events like cricket matches between police officers and youth.
In his personal time, Sergeant Dhaliwal has mentored numerous young people aspiring to careers in law enforcement and supported education efforts aimed at helping parents recognize and prevent factors that put youth at risk for gang involvement. He was also instrumental in launching the Kids Play Foundation in Calgary and facilitating the work of Kids Up Front, two organizations that connect children and youth with sporting opportunities they otherwise would not experience.
Maggie MacKillop
2023 Lifetime Achievement in Community Policing
Maggie MacKillop moved to Calgary 23 years ago to join a pilot project that brought social supports, judges, crown prosecutors, defence counsellors, and law enforcement together into a specialized court to better support families experiencing domestic violence. The pilot project Ms. MacKillop joined later became the non-profit agency, HomeFront. Over time, the relationships that she built with law enforcement and justice officials led to HomeFront getting unprecedented access to court information and the ability to now provide support to families in crisis as an integrated part of courtrooms.
In 2004, her work was again integral in expanding HomeFront’s role as the organization partnered with the Calgary Police Service to form the Domestic Conflict Response Team. This team paired HomeFront caseworkers with police officers to intervene with families identified by the police as being at risk for their conflicts escalating to domestic violence.
In 2014, Ms. MacKillop became HomeFront’s Executive Director where she has worked tirelessly to not only improve the supports offered by the organization, but also to secure the funding to resource them. She has worked collaboratively with other agencies across Calgary as a member of the Calgary Domestic Violence Collective, Connect Family and Sexual Abuse Network Operations Committee, and Safer Calgary Committee. Under her leadership, HomeFront has helped cut domestic violence re-offence rates in half and their court supports have helped more than double victim engagement in the justice process.
Almost 90 per cent of the families helped by the Domestic Conflict Response Team she led have seen reduced or no further domestic conflict. The success of this team is so undeniable that in 2019, Ms. MacKillop worked with the Calgary Police Service to reimagine the program and incorporate case workers from six other agencies to both provide more specialized supports and make the program more sustainable.
In addition to transforming how families experiencing domestic conflict and violence are supported after a police interaction, Ms. MacKillop has used her relationships and expertise to improve Indigenous people’s experience in the justice system. She was instrumental in helping launch Calgary’s Indigenous Court, which brings together culturally-appropriate wrap-around supports to address non-violent crimes committed by Indigenous offenders. She is also active with the Safety of Indigenous Women in an Urban Setting Collective.
Detective Christina Witt, PhD
2023 Lifetime of Distinguished Service
Detective Christina Witt has been a police officer for 24 years and showed exceptional skill from the beginning, having been selected by her instructors during recruit training for the Bill Shelever Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement. During her time in policing, she has served as an investigator in the Drug Unit, Child Abuse Unit, Professional Standards Section, Major Crimes Section, and as a member of the Calgary Police Service Threat Assessment Committee. She has been primary investigator, file manager, affiant, and support in over 200 suspicious death investigations. Over her career, she has demonstrated skill in interviewing witnesses, victims and suspects, as well as in operational planning, search and seizure, and training other officers in investigative techniques.
In addition to being an outstanding investigator, Detective Witt has shown a commitment to bettering her profession. She has presented homicide investigation case studies in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, the United States and Australia, to share lessons learned and support the development of best practices for investigators internationally. She has also contributed to knowledge sharing and advancing policing as a member of the Homicide Research Working Group, the National Homicide Investigators Association, the Coalition for Canadian Police Reform, and a research group assessing the feasibility of a Professional College of Policing in British Columbia.
Detective Witt also has made exceptional contributions to innovation and training the next generation of law enforcement professionals through her academic career. She holds a PhD from Charles Sturt University, where she focused her studies on death investigation methods. Since 2010, she has served as a sessional instructor in the Mount Royal University criminal justice program in addition to her duties at the Calgary Police Service. She is an accomplished academic writer and has published over 10 research papers aimed at improving homicide and child abuse investigations by bridging academic research with the knowledge of practitioners.