Thompson’s seven-person StreetReach team, three of whom work full-time, have located missing teens, checked hundreds of addresses and spent time building relationships with youth at risk of being sexually exploited over about six months since being reincarnated, members of the Thompson Chamber of Commerce heard at their Dec. 2 online meeting.
Team leader Billie-Jo Thompson said that StreetReach, which also has two part-time and two casual employees and deals with youth aged 11 to 17, returned more than 150 youth to foster homes or group homes since beginning operations in June, including about 60 per month in both July and August, through the numbers have started to decline, in part because of COVID-19 pandemic public health orders.
“Every morning we get an email from the RCMP, detailing all the missing youth in the community and it’s the job of the team to go out and locate those youth and return them back to placement,” she said. “We want to alleviate the pressure on the RCMP and return them so the RCMP are not having to do that. Missing kids aren’t criminals. It frees [police] up to better respond to more important serious crimes in the community.”
The task of returning missing youth is by no means always a one-and-done scenario.
“We do return kids and honestly maybe 10, 15 minutes later they will leave again,” Thompson said. “It’s our responsibility to continue to picking them up and returning them over and over and over again until it stops. We don’t give up. We don’t just say, ‘Well, you just left again so we’re not going to look for you.’ We’ll continue to monitor them.”
The current StreetReach team is not the first for the north. There was previously one in the city about 10 years ago, a little after the provincial government created StreetReach Winnipeg. That team was later dissolved but the new one arose from its ashes when the provincial government pledged $2.1 million over thee years, including $900,000 this year and next, to start it up again and help Thompson deal with the high number of missing children and youth reports it receives. Over the past few years, Thompson RCMP received an average of six to eight such reports every night, though it has recently dropped down to three or four as a result of both StreetReach’s efforts and COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on gatherings, says acting detachment officer-in-charge Staff. Sgt. Chris Hastie.
Inspired by the Dallas, Texas police department’s high-risk victims unit, StreetReach also seeks to prevent sexual abuse and exploitation and intervene to stop those who target young, high-risk victims.
“We see individuals, adults, lurking around the downtown area, the liquor store, anywhere where there’s vulnerable people or people under the influence of alcohol and trying to lure them to get them to go with them, bribing them with alcohol, with weed, with a pack of cigarettes, warm clothing, whatever it may be, in exchange for sexual favours,” said Thompson.
StreetReach’s attempts to develop relationships with high-risk youth helps its workers to identify offenders and pass on what they learn to police.
Hastie says that information provided by StreetReach has resulted in criminal investigations being initiated and arrests being made and charges laid in some cases.
The main focus of the program is not enforcement, however, but providing at-risk youth with people to turn to and rely on.
“The kids we’re dealing with, they already have nothing,” says Thompson. “There’s nothing that we can do to them that hasn’t already been done and done worse so we want to come from a nurturing and a harm reduction approach and just support them and love them and let them know that we care for them, we’re rooting for them and that they do have a future. It does not have to be this way. There’s a different path they can definitely be on."
The StreetReach team’s provincial funding runs until March 2022 but Thompson is hopeful that its work will prove that it is a needed service.
“We’re really hoping that .. we’re so successful that the province does extend our funding,” she told chamber members.
