It was standing room only in the Ashmont Legion Hall while St. Paul Staff Sgt. Corey Blize gave his presentation of crime statistics specific to the County of St. Paul during a meeting that more than 150 people attended regarding in the Ashmont area, Sept. 24.
One of the statistics Blize discussed was the Crime Severity Index in the St. Paul area, which includes data from all areas of the detachment. The County of St. Paul has a CSI score of 195.1, while the Town of St. Paul has a CSI score of 253.9. Blize said the CSI data can be misleading, which is why they look at several different metrics to determine crime trends.
“When a population is near or under 5,000, it can be greatly skewed. Because each crime is given a score, so a crime involving death like a homicide is going to have a really high score. So because it’s based on that score and population, you could have one homicide that increased it 50 points in a small community, whereas in a city it could increase it by like five points.”
Statistics regarding crime numbers in just the county, within the St. Paul detachment area from January to August 2018 were presented. The County of St. Paul is policed by both St. Paul and Elk Point RCMP detachments. The numbers given did not include crimes from the Town of St. Paul, Saddle Lake, or Goodfish Lake.
Overall, persons crimes are fairly steady as compared to previous years. There were 11 sexual assaults reported in 2018 as compared to two in 2015, 2016, and 2017.
“A little bit of that is because of the #MeToo, people are more likely to come forward now,” said Blize.
Property crime was the category of greatest interest to the group, and the overall trend shows property crime is decreasing.
Sgt. James Morton is with the Eastern Alberta Crime Reduction Unit, a provincially funded task force working in 27 RCMP detachments in northeastern Alberta.
“Our job is to focus on the five per cent of the population who cause 95 per cent of the problems,” said Morton.
The Crime Reduction Unit targets prolific offenders by doing curfew checks and working with probation and other agencies to get those offenders on the right side of the law. Officers working in the unit do not take the calls for car accidents, wellness checks, and other non-criminal matters the RCMP frequently deal with.
Responding to the complaint that people living in the county don’t often see the RCMP out making patrols, Morton said, “There’s a lot of you folks that live on range roads and township roads in the middle of nowhere. Typically speaking, why are the police going to come out there other than to make a patrol if there’s issues in that area? But if they don’t know there’s issues, they don’t know to make the patrol.”
The need for prompt reporting of crime was the key issue raised by the RCMP at the Monday meeting.
“And yes, every single one of these things may not be able to be solved, but when we get a number of calls and can start piecing things together, then all of a sudden we’ve solved five things where before we had five individual unsolved things. But if we didn’t have all five, we might not have pieced everything together. Investigations are just like a piece of thread. You pull on it and see what the end of it is, and then pull on the next one,” said Blize.
When Morton asked the crowd to raise their hands if they had ever been victims of crime, two to three dozen people responded. That number dropped as he started asking when those crimes had occurred, leaving less than a dozen hands up when asked if they had been victims within the last six months. Later, when Morton asked how many people had reported crimes to the police, only about 10 people raised their hands.
In a follow up interview, Blize said social media can inflate the perception of crime in a community.
“It’s time perception, because if you’re a victim it’s fresh. And you may think it was just the other day but in fact it was weeks ago. But the way people talk, especially on social media, it's as if it just happened.”
Callback unit keeps RCMP on the road
One concern shared by people at the meeting was a feeling that the RCMP doesn’t always respond to calls.
Blize explained that one of their new initiatives to keep members on the road as much as possible is the callback unit, which returns calls for complaints where there’s no physical evidence, no suspects, and no serial number to be entered in the database.
“A perfect example is theft of fuel. Some people tonight said there’s theft of fuel and they haven’t made a complaint because they didn’t want to waste a member's time by coming out there because we didn’t see anything. There’s no physical evidence, and it’s fuel so there’s nothing unique to it,” said Blize.
“The callback unit will make that call to the complainant, get the full details, do up the occurrence. It doesn’t take a member off the road, and that information is in the computer so we can put it on the crime mapping.”
A map of the St. Paul detachment area shows clusters of property crimes.
“With the crime mapping tool, now we can see when there’s a cluster and so we do more patrols. And a lot of times (the cluster) is caused by one or two people,” said Blize.
Blize said the callback unit has had a minimal impact in St. Paul since it was started in February. A total of 28 calls were diverted to the unit. Blize said that’s because most of the minor complaints come in during the day when the detachment is less busy.
Rural Crime Watch group needs active members
Orest Sereda is one of the organizers for Greater Lakeland Rural Crime Watch, which has struggled to keep members involved.
“Twenty people from Ashmont are on that list, we even had a couple sign up at our AGM in February. But as far as people from Mallaig, St. Lina, Glendon, they don’t come to our meetings. The majority of the people coming are from Elk Point,” said Sereda.
Sereda says the next meeting for the provincial group is on Nov. 3 in Elk Point while the Greater Lakeland Rural Crime Watch will meet Nov. 15, in Elk Point.
County of St. Paul CAO Sheila Kitz suggested using the county’s existing mass notification system to help the rural crime watch groups better connect with members.
“So when residents sign up to be on the system, they can give us their cell number, they can give us their e-mail address, they can give us their home phone number. It will dial out in whatever order you want us to do that, and you can pick what kind of notifications you’re interested in. So if you decide, or if I hear that this is a good way to go we can set it up so it can be a rural crime watch,” said Kitz.
An alternative to the rural crime watch group discussed at the meeting was area crime watches.
“Like the one guy (Morton) said take care of the neighbour on the left and on the right,” said Allan Tkachyk, an area resident who said he doesn’t plan to get involved with the rural crime watch group, but liked the idea of a neighbourhood specific group.
“You’ve got to be the eyes of the community and be careful,” said Joyce Sallstrom.
Police scanners to be obsolete by mid-October
St. Paul RCMP is upgrading its radios to the Alberta First Responder Radio Communications System (AFRRCS) and expects the new system to be live on or before Oct. 19.
“We’re going to encrypted radios, so basically you have no entertainment at night now. So the scanning apps won’t work” said Blize, earning a laugh from the crowd, at the meeting in Ashmont.
In a follow up interview, he explained the switch to AFRRCS improves privacy for people calling to make complaints.
“Unless you have the encryption codes, that change frequently, you wont be able to hear the transmissions.” The new system also improves safety for the RCMP members.
“They have twice as many repeater sites as the old system does . . . So it’s better radio coverage, we won’t have as many dead spots,” said Blize.
The St. Paul detachment has AFRRCS training scheduled for the week after Thanksgiving (Oct. 9-13).
