Enforcement activities related to the Thompson RCMP’s priority focus areas are up over the last quarter of the 2017-18 fiscal year, with more drug warrants executed and more drunk drivers, as well as more youth engagement activities, commanding officer Insp. Kevin Lewis told councillors at their May 22 meeting.
Overall, municipal Thompson RCMP officers responded to 17,421 calls for service from April 1 of last year to March 31 of this year, including 784 traffic tickets that were issued, up from 612 the year before.
In the fourth quarter of the reporting year – January, February and March of this year – Thompson RCMP kept tabs on 32 prolific offenders in the community, executed 13 drug warrants and laid 20 impaired driving charges, while also issuing 90 traffic tickets, taking part in 336 community relations events and conducting 709 harm reduction actions.
Offender management is designed to deter criminal activity by known criminals through methods such as visiting those who have been released from prison or custody on court-ordered conditions and returning them to custody if they are determined to be violating those conditions.
Drug warrants have led to seizure of substantial amounts of cocaine as well as some marijuana, Lewis said.
“We’re seeing a consistent level of cocaine in the city. We’re not seeing meth, thank God, right now but as it stands there was a considerable amount of cocaine that was taken off the streets in the last three months from January to March.”
RCMP are also working to reduce the number of times they deal with people with addictions issues.
“We also have Project Detox which identifies high-risk individuals that interact with police on a regular basis,” Lewis said. “We try to get them into the court system to get mandated drug counselling and treatment, which is slowly working for some of the individuals.”
Responding to a question from Coun. Duncan Wong regarding vandalism, Lewis said there is usually a correlation between that activity and how many youth in care have gone absent without leave (AWOL) from group homes in Thompson.
“If they’re AWOL from the group homes that means they’re probably out there up to no good,” Lewis said. “We try to intercept them before they get to that point.”
Lewis also said that, while calls for service went up about 1,700 calls, or more than 10 per cent, from 2016-17 to 2017-18, the numbers are not out of line with what the detachment has seen in previous years.
“There’s been years where it was up into the 18,000s so it’s still lower than it has been but again it just depends on who’s out of jail, how many youth we have right now,” Lewis said.
Some changes can be attributed to changes in the way RCMP reports incidents.
“Previous years we did not score missing persons for AWOL youth so now we see about 2,000 AWOL youth coming from the group homes,” he said.
The period when community safety officers (CSOs) could not enforce provincial statutes also had an effect on crime numbers, as does the reduction from eight CSOs to six.
“They normally would to take the heat off of us and we see that with the lodging numbers that they lodge in cells lower now than they have been before,” Lewis said. “They usually look after 90 per cent of that for us.”
Coun. Penny Byer asked what harm reduction activities entail.
“Whether it’s, say, a vulnerable female or a vulnerable youth in an intoxicated state around individuals that may be nefarious, it could be somebody that’s passing out in the snow, those types of activities where somebody’s life or some type of danger to these individuals,” said Lewis.
Mayor Dennis Fenske pointed out that an increase in some policing statistics is a good thing, such as the detachment increasing youth engagement activities from 470 in 2016-17 to more than 600 in the year that ended March 31.
“We want that number to go way up,” said the mayor. “The more the RCMP interact with youth, the more comfortable the youth are with them.”
Fenske also said the partnership between Thompson RCMP and the CSOs is being noticed outside the city, including at the national level. Fenske was in Ottawa recently for a conference that included an address by newly appointed RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki, who was formerly stationed in Thompson, and deputy commissioner Kevin Brousseau, who used to be the Manitoba “D” Division commanding officer.
“It was very humbling to hear both the commissioner and the deputy commissioner highlight to all across Canada in that room the CSO program in Thompson,” Fenske said. “It speaks volumes.”
