By this time next week, Prairie Bylaw Enforcement will be gone after almost three years in Thompson.
Ian Thompson, the city's fire chief and director of public safety, told council Aug. 16 the decision to have the Prairie Bylaw Enforcement officers leave Aug. 31 rather than stay through the Labour Day weekend as had been originally planned was "strictly a financial decision," as the original ending date would fall in the middle of a work cycle.
"These people would only be booked for one week," Thompson said. "They'd have to be paid for two, but they'd only work one."
Prairie Bylaw Enforcement decided in May to pull out of Thompson after almost three years when council chopped their annual contract amount by a third from $456,250 to $306,250. Prairie Bylaw Enforcement owner Dave Prud'homme declined to accept the $150,000 budget cut in return for reduced level of service, so the city asked him to end the contract almost seven months early, and he agreed.
Council is considering a recommendation from the public safety committee that would see it spend $250,000 a year more in RCMP policing targetting the downtown area - on top of the approximately $3.5 million it already spends annually with the federal police force for municipal policing.
The committee has recommended hiring two additional RCMP officers at a cost of $200,000, who would be specifically assigned to downtown enforcement, while another $50,000 would be set aside for additional RCMP overtime to deal "increased downtown coverage to help cover busier times when the two officers may not be available."
"The city had approved $317,050 in the 2010 budget for PBLE. This amount covers PBLE's work until the end of August," said acting city manager Gary Ceppetelli Aug. 20. "This amount will be included as the base amount when council begins their 2011 budget process."
Ceppetelli said the $250,000 is a "recommendation from the public safety committee" that "the money in the budget be allocated as per their report. Council has not made any decision on this report.
"The RCMP have indicated that they are redirecting resources to address the absence of PBLE," Ceppetelli added.
Insp. Ken Poulsen, head of the Thompson RCMP detachment, noted that the RCMP have had a greater presence on patrol in the downtown area since June. "We've looked at some peak periods over time, and we've scheduled dedicated shifts," Poulsen said.
Separately, the city is also lobbying the provincial Department of Justice to cost share with them two more new RCMP officers "targeted at gang and drug issues."
The city had a long-running feud with the Manitoba Department of Justice over its repeated requests that the province make Prairie Bylaw Enforcement peace officers to allow them to lay charges under provincial liquor legislation.
Prairie Bylaw officers can only enforce bylaws of the city but not provincial statues, which can only be enforced by peace officers, such as the RCMP.
Mayor Tim Johnston has noted in the past some bylaw officers in Winnipeg have been granted peace officer status to enforce provincial liquor control statues and he wanted to see that happen in Thompson as well. It didn't happen.
Prairie Bylaw Enforcement came to Thompson with a somewhat chequered track record in southern Manitoba, but there were no similar problems during their three years in Thompson.
In August 2004, the province ordered the company to stop using Taser stun guns and to stop enforcing laws under the province's jurisdiction, including patrolling highways for speeders. Prairie Bylaw Enforcement Services had been enforcing municipal bylaws and some provincial statutes - such as the Highway Traffic Act - in five municipalities around Winnipeg. At the time of the 2004 controversy, the company said it had a four-year-old letter from the provincial Justice Department, which "authorized" it to "conduct bylaw and specific provincial statute enforcement." They also say they had a similar letter from a judge.
Also, in April 2006, MichaelSandham, a full-patch member of the Bandidos outlaw motorcycle gang and leader of the Winnipeg chapter, who was also a former East St. Paul police officer - and Prairie Bylaw Enforcement officer - was involved in the notorious slaying of eight rival bikers in the Iona Station farm massacre in southwestern Ontario, near London.
Sandham was arrested two months later on eight charges of first-degree murder and convicted all eight counts last October. It was the worst such mass killing in modern Ontario history.
Sandham was a police officer in of East St. Paul from June 2000 to October 2002. He trained at the Winnipeg Police Training Academy.
He was suspended and then resigned from the East. St. Paul force after Winnipeg police provided his employer with pictures of him attending a Bandidos function when he was on leave from work
Sandham went on to work as an officer for Prairie Bylaw Enforcement Services in several municipalities. He was involved in training Prairie Bylaw Enforcement staff, and council meeting minutes from a number of communities showed he also patrolled areas and enforced local bylaws. In some towns, he was assigned a badge number.
Prud'homme said in 2006 he had received an excellent letter of recommendation about Sandham from the chief of the East St. Paul police. Prud'homme said the company also did a criminal background check on Sandham that came up clean and he had no criminal record at that point.
Prud'homme said Sandham was well liked and respected by the other officers working for Prairie Bylaw Enforcement, although he said he knew very little about Sandham's personal life.
The Thompson RCMP detachment, with support from the public safety committee, is also moving towards targetting so-called "prolific offenders" as part of the force's Crime Reduction Strategies (CRS) policing model, said Poulsen
"CRS is a move towards police officers focusing their efforts on identifying the offenders causing the most harm in a community. These offenders who meet a certain criteria are, otherwise known as 'prolific offenders,' Poulsen said in a June 15 report to city council presented June 22.
In British Columbia, the Ministry of the Attorney General's "Prolific Offender Management Project" uses specific criteria to define prolific offenders, including:
a history of frequent offending;
intelligence indicates they are still criminally active (primarily police);
an assessment that they are at medium to high risk to re-offend.
Results show annual drops of 10 to 40 per cent in targeted crimes in the RCMP pilot areas in British Columbia, the project notes.
Two "re-aligned positions" from within the Thompson detachment are now responsible for co-ordinating the new crime reductions initiatives and "help provide a focus to target-based enforcement," Poulsen said.
Lou Morissette, a former RCMP staff sergeant and MLCC liquor inspector here, who now operates Setting Security Consultants and sits on the public safety committee, extolled the benefits of "Crime Reduction Teams" (CRT) and targetting prolific offenders in his 68-page five-year public safety plan to city council last January.
In 2007, the city hoped to be part of a $70,000 RCMP pilot project that would have seen two community safety officers on the streets of downtown Thompson. Insp. Keith Finn, then the officer-in-charge of what was the Thompson amalgamated detachment, who recently transferred from operations Officer for Manitoba North District to the national security section in Ottawa, did what he could to make the pilot program fly, but the program wound up buried in a sea of bureaucratic red tape at Mountie headquarters in Ottawa.
The project, first announced in April 2007, would have seen two community safety officers focus on bylaw enforcement such as the behavioural and graffiti bylaws. The project got bogged down in concerns in Ottawa about legal liability, among other things.
The new public safety committee plan this year also calls for hiring and training an additional city bylaw officer at a cost of $70,000.
