The City of Thompson held a public safety committee informational meeting in the Letkemann Theatre at R. D. Parker Collegiate on the evening of April 29 to give the citizens of Thompson a chance to voice their opinion on what they think of the recommendations outlined in Lou Morissette's five-year public safety plan for the city.
About 45 local residents turned out for the meeting, which had been advertised publicly with conflicting starting times between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Morissette, owner of Setting Security Consultants, who is also a citizen appointee on the public safety committee and has worked as an MLCC liquor inspector in Thompson and an RCMP staff sergeant, presented his plan to city council on Feb. 1.
One of the main points of his report was Morissette's observation that Prairie Bylaw Enforcement, which costs the city approximately $456,000 per year, is not helping relieve problems in the downtown area.
Morissette came up with 10 recommendations in his report. These include creating a Harm Reduction Zone working group to study how to work with alcohol dependant street clients in Thompson; the creation of a bylaw enforcement strategy; discussions about the feasibility of a 12- hour RCMP shift schedule pilot project; that RCMP members who work in municipal positions be only deployed outside the City of Thompson under conditions defined in the Municipal Policing Agreement Thompson; that discussions take place between the RCMP, the City of Thompson and the city's chief financial officer about RCMP invoicing; the creation of an inter-agency exchange of personal names and information regarding people who are constantly arrested who do not have a mandated healthcare referral; that the RCMP looks at creating a position for someone to deal exclusively with gangs; to create a reserve fund for things like foot patrols; transportation of street clients to their home communities; and to create a Thompson crime reduction team.
Coun. Judy Kolada, chair of the public safety committee, said in a later interview that although the meeting was held to discuss with the public Morissette's Feb. 1 recommendations, most of the people who showed up weren't in any way familiar with them and unable to discuss them in any meaningful way.
"The only good suggestion I felt that we could use was the one Volker Beckmann talked about," she explains. "He travels to Europe extensively and what he's saying is that cameras are all over now."
Kolada says that there are security cameras in place where she works, at the YWCA, and that it has helped them discover who vandalizes their building, for example, and when.
"I do think from my experience with the cameras at the YWCA that installing cameras is an excellent solution, but very expensive to install and monitor. However, in the downtown area it might really help us if we're going to address some of the issues that are taking place."
Morissette himself was at the public meeting, and he says that he was pleased with the amount of people that showed up. He says he doubts that anyone will be totally supportive of all the recommendations in his report, and felt that some people wanted to see more in the study relating to social options tied into crime prevention. Morissette says he agrees with that viewpoint, but that the streamlined focus of the study was about where the City of Thompson is spending the most enforcement dollars.
Morissette says there were questions from the public that asked directly about what Prairie Bylaw Enforcement's powers of arrest and detention were. He points out that the officers are limited to a citizen's arrest and are not appointed as peace officers in the Province of Manitoba. Because of that, Morissette says they can only enforce municipal bylaws. He went on to say that unlike the RCMP, the City of Thompson is both "civilly and criminally liable" for Prairie Bylaw Enforcement. His take is that the City of Thompson needs provincially- endorsed law enforcement that meets higher enforcement standards than the bylaw officers.
Dave Prud'Homme, owner of Prairie Bylaw Enforcement, on the other hand, says the main thing he got from the meeting was the amount of public agencies and community organizations that were upset because they had not been contacted by Morissette to be involved in his study - including the Citizens on Patrol Program (COPP).
"The main message from the public was for the public safety committee to take everything into consideration and do this as a joint operation with recommendations from everybody involved in the community, including different organizations, and listen to what they've got to say and work as a team to come up with something that's going to work," Prud'Homme explains.
He also defended Prairie Bylaw Enforcement, saying that Morissette has never gone on a ride-along with any bylaw officers and doesn't understand the work they do on a street level.
"There have been hundreds of people that we've found alternate lodging for where if we didn't find it, they'd have had to go into RCMP cells," he says. "When you think of the thousands of units of booze that we've dumped that didn't reach somebody's lips, and all the unpottables and all the accommodations we've found for everybodythere's more to us than just pouring out a bottle and telling someone to get on their way."
