Public safety and criminal justice initiatives aimed at reducing crime in Thompson and speeding up the resolution of criminal charges dealt with at the city’s court office are proceeding slowly, even as incidents similar to those from the past continue to occur.
Manitoba RCMP’s media relations unit reported this week on two machetes being seized in Thompson in the span of a single day, a little more than two years after a spike in knife-related incidents – five people were stabbed within a week of each other in late May and early June at that time – led to 2019 earning a reputation as the “year of the machete.”
A public safety strategy for the city, which the provincial government pledged $300,000 towards in May 2019, still hasn’t been released to the public, while court office renovations are, to a large extent, not even started yet.
Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic and public health responses such as the ban on non-essential travel to Northern Manitoba that was in effect for much of it, have hampered the ability of the city and provincial governments to roll things out as fast as they’d like, but there are reasons that urgency is needed.
When the results of a community safety survey, designed by Saskatoon-based consultant Community Safety Knowledge Alliance (CSKA), which was awarded the contract for the first phase of the public safety strategy on March 16, 2020, a few days after the first positive test for COVID-19 in Manitoba took place, were revealed in September of last year, several hundred respondents indicated that they had plans to move to Winnipeg or elsewhere in southern Manitoba, or to another province, many of them within two years or less. Three-quarters of nearly 1,600 people said that if nothing was done about community safety for three or four years, the situation in the city would get much worse. One of those years has since elapsed.
In-person public consultations about community safety were held last September, but little news about the strategy has been forthcoming since, though Mayor Colleen Smook remarked at a recent council meeting that the draft version of it had been received.
Within a couple of weeks after the provincial funding for the safety strategy was announced, plans for $11 million worth of renovations to the Thompson court office were revealed. Work to be done included creating a smaller courtroom for a judicial justice of the peace and a child-friendly courtroom as well as a safer and separate waiting area for victims, including child witnesses. Security equipment such as closed-circuit (CCTV) cameras, X-ray machines and handheld and walk-through metal detectors were also among the improvements proposed.
A perimeter security screening area, the addition of a building lockdown system and upgraded CCTV security cameras inside and outside the building have been completed so far, Justice Minister Cameron Friesen said in a response to a letter requesting an update that the mayor sent him in May.
“Providing efficient and responsive criminal justice services in Thompson and its surrounding communities is a priority for my department,” Friesen wrote, noting that a vacant Crown attorney position at the Thompson court office was set to be filled by a new lawyer last month and that a competition then underway to find a Crown attorney for The Pas would result in the elimination of the last such vacancy for those positions in Northern Manitoba.
It may seem like crime has gone down in Thompson since 2019. There were half-a-dozen press releases sent out regarding incidents Thompson RCMP responded to this June. Two years ago, there were around 20 articles about police responses in the city in the same month. It probably isn’t because crime has dropped by two-thirds, since Thompson RCMP detachment commander Insp. Chris Hastie said at a public safety committee meeting in May that he expects the number of calls officers deal with will normalize to 2019 levels as public health orders are lifted. Certainly, there have been success stories over the past two years, particularly the reincarnated StreetReach North program, which has helped to drastically reduce the number of missing youth reports that police have to deal with. The difference could also be partly due to a drop in the number of local RCMP news releases. In October 2019, a few months after an article in the Thompson Citizen decrying the fact that the only way to get information about some local crime incidents was to read about them on social media and contact Manitoba RCMP media relations in Winnipeg fpr details, there were 24 releases from the Thompson RCMP detachment. In June 2021, there were four. It may be due to a drop in incidents or policy changes on what gets released and how, perhaps a combination of both.
When it comes to improving community safety in Thompson, the current group of councillors is running out of time. Funding for the strategy was announced during the first year of their term. Less than four months from now, they’ll be into their last year. The strategy isn’t about a quick fix, of course, but there isn’t lot to show yet for some high-profile safety and justice announcements more than two years after they were made.
