Insp. Kevin Lewis was one of the main focal points of Monday’s Thompson city council meeting, where he walked city officials through the local RCMP’s activity for the 2017–18 fiscal year.
While his report mostly focused on the third quarter, from October through December 2017, Lewis also went over some “year-to-date” figures, like how his detachment has received 17,148 calls for service between April and the end of 2017.
These calls for service include any event that requires an officer to attend and/or take some type of action, and Lewis reported that they experienced a roughly 5.4 per cent increase in activity on that front since 2016–2017.
“Like I said before, Thompson is the ‘mini Vegas’ for the north,” said Lewis. “Everybody comes here to party, right? You’ve got the liquor stores, you’ve got shopping, and you’ve got bars, and unfortunately we see all the repercussions of that in the downtown core, and this summer was by far the busiest summer I’ve seen in Thompson.”
Lewis said the fall and winter months from October to December also saw their fair share of incidents, since his officers conducted 20 prolific offender checks, followed through on nine search warrants for drugs, and processed 53 impaired driving charges on top of issuing 243 regular traffic tickets.
Outside of focusing on drug enforcement and organized crime, Lewis mentioned that much of their time and energy is dedicated to dealing with incidents that involve the homeless population and mental health crises, since they’ve received 2,240 harm reduction calls this fiscal year so far.
Since most of these cases revolve around individuals who are dealing with addiction issues or health problems that require transferring to a hospital or housing program, Lewis said these calls eat up a lot of their time that could be spent on investigating more severe crimes.
“Rather than just picking them up and kicking them out, we want to get something a little bit more stable, longer term so that we’re not doing the same thing five years [down the line] with the same people,” he said. “So if we can get the courts involved, dry them out a little bit, and make sure there’s some counselling there, we’re hoping to reduce the amount of times we’re dealing with these folks.”
Lewis followed up this statement by praising the efforts of Thompson’s community safety officers (CSOs), since they are usually responsible for dealing with a large chunk these incidents in the downtown core.
Currently, there are six CSOs on duty in Thompson, who are mainly there to support a police force that already has to contend with one of the highest crime rates in the country.
While some residents raised questions about the long-term viability of the CSO program at the Jan. 2 council meeting, Lewis reaffirmed that these officers do make a substantial difference in the RCMP’s day-to-day activities, especially when it comes to disturbances in the downtown area.
“Between the hours of 10 in the morning until 9 o’clock at night, CSOs are dealing with that and it’s taking a lot of work off our plate,” said Lewis. “I’d say about 40–50 per cent of our workload that was in the downtown core is significantly reduced.”
To read the RCMP’s quarterly report in full, please consult with this council meeting’s digital agenda, which is available on the city’s website.
The next Thompson city council meeting is scheduled to take place Jan. 29 at City Hall.
