RESTRICTING RURAL CRIME

The worrisome problem of rural crime is getting the attention it deserves. Landowners who live outside the city have repeatedly lamented that they’re targeted for crimes such as break-ins because of a reduced police presence, including troubling response times.

The NDP unveiled a seven-point plan in the spring that featured $10 million to hire more RCMP officers, civilian staff and Crown prosecutors, as well as reinforce crime reduction units and fund so-called bait farm equipment to catch prolific offenders. By all accounts, the strategy appears to be working: citing RCMP statistics, the government says rural property crime dropped 10 per cent in May, shortly after the plan came into effect.

More recently, the United Conservative Party released its own report on the matter, shedding light on what the Opposition calls a crisis. It notes that RCMP officials who attended the party’s town hall meetings acknowledged the legitimacy of concerns about inappropriate police response times, communication deficiencies and a shortage of policing personnel.

Clearly, further improvements must be made, and the increasing tendency of rural residents to lose faith in the system must be reversed.

“The stories that we were hearing at our town halls (weren’t) just that the police were far away, or they were late to calls,” says Mike Ellis, the UCP MLA for Calgary-West and the party’s solicitor general critic.

“We were hearing the police weren’t responding at all.”

The UCP report says if the party gains power in 2019, it will lobby the federal government to strengthen defence of person and defence of property provisions in Canada’s Criminal Code. Residents want clear answers on when they can use force to defend themselves, it says.

It’s a healthy conversation to have, but it’s not likely that rural dwellers are going to be provided with clear instructions on how to react to a criminal violation. It boils down to responding with reasonable force, because there’s a tremendous difference between a stranger tinkering with an ATV outside on an acreage and an intruder standing beside the bed at night holding a weapon.

Alberta must ensure rural police forces are able to respond to calls in a timely fashion. It should also deal more harshly with offenders — especially those who repeatedly engage in rural crime — to signal that wrongdoing won’t be tolerated.

That’s how the problem will be solved, not with the naive notion that rural residents can informally be deputized as law enforcement officers.