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City manager tells Rotary Club that public safety is number one issue

Thompson city manager Anthony McInnis spoke to the Rotary Club Feb. 13 about city efforts to curtail crime and enhance public safety. “The issue that I’m the busiest with right now is public safety,” he said.
city manager anthony mcinnis feb 2019 chamber of commerce
City manager Anthony Mcinnis, seen here speaking to the Thompson Chamber of Commerce in February 2019, told the Rotary Club Feb. 13 that public safety is the number one issue for the mayor, council and city administration right now.

Thompson city manager Anthony McInnis spoke to the Rotary Club Feb. 13 about city efforts to curtail crime and enhance public safety.

“The issue that I’m the busiest with right now is public safety,” he said. “Last summer was pretty horrible, there were lots of crime issues. That’s obviously number one for our administration. It felt like last year we didn’t have any answers and the community was getting quite frustrated with this. So we’ve been lobbying hard with the provincial government. We want to move as quickly as possible. We have a lot of dollars coming in.”

The provincial government has committed $2.1 million to the Street Reach program, which engages youth runaways and youth who are prone to sexual exploitation. 

“Youth that run away might be facing exploitation at home, or they are from outside communities that come here to group homes and they don’t have a family structure,” explained McInnis. “Street Reach has two purposes, it engages the youth, but it also provides intelligence to the police side of things. The workers are going out and finding the houses that are taking these kids in, often those are houses where there’s often drugs and criminal activity. There’s two sides to it – protecting the youth but also providing intelligence so that we can shut down criminal activity.”

McInnis also said that the city received $50,000 towards a court diversion hub model that is focused on youth.

“So, if there’s a serious charge, it’s still going to the police and court,” he said. “Others that are less serious, or the youth are young enough and we still have a chance to intervene, we put them on the right track and it goes through the hub. It’s all being run out of the Ma-Mow-We-Tak Friendship Centre. They call it the Thompson Community Response Team.”

The province has also committed $300,000 towards helping Thompson develop a public safety strategy. 

“What they want is to hear what’s coming out of the community and how we spend those dollars,” McInnis said. 

Council has also helped implement strategic control of liquor sales.

“Beer vendors have all agreed now, with pressure from council, to shut down sales prior to bars closing, so people can’t leave the bar intoxicated, buy more alcohol, and cause further problems in the evening,” he said. “What we are also doing now, this will take some work with the province, is changing the hours that liquor is sold in the mornings. Right now, I believe you can go out and buy a bottle at 10 a.m. We’ve told the province that we might want to change it to 11 a.m., or noon. Just to give the people downtown, who might have addiction issues, one or two more hours to sober up.”

The city is also “pushing hard” for a sobering centre called the Main Street North Project.

“That’s gaining traction, and I’m really crossing my fingers that next week or in two weeks when the minister is up that he’ll make that announcement,” said McInnis. “The ideas with that multipurpose facility are that you have paramedics there and nurses trying to intervene.”  

McInnis said there is a discussion about placing surveillance cameras “everywhere” downtown with a centralized system viewed by the police.

“There is an appetite in council, but they want to hear what the community has to say about it,” he explained, admitting the plan would raise some privacy issues. 

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