Sask. faces increase in rural crime

Saskatchewan is adding more police positions, giving other officers more power and will lobby for a crackdown on young offenders to try to tackle growing crime rates, especially in rural areas.

Justice Minister Gord Wyant said Tuesday that the government will create a new protection and response team to help reduce crime in rural Saskatchewan.

The team would be comprised of 258 armed officers, but only 30 are new police positions. Forty highway commercial vehicle enforcement officers will be armed and, along with conservation officers who already carry guns, will be able to respond to calls and make arrests.

That means conservation officers could be called to break and enters if they were closer to the scene than the RCMP.

“They also deal with people that have firearms, more often than not, and have very similar training,” said Dale McPhee, deputy minister of Corrections and policing.

“What we’re trying to do is, we’re going to sit down and make sure that standard response training is the same so we can get a first car there. Police officers ... actually don’t necessarily run into those environments, what they do is they assess the situation based on their training, just as (conservation officers) would taking a firearms call with somebody in the bush.”

The measures are in response to recommendations from a committee that Premier Brad Wall appointed last November to look at crime across the province.

People around Saskatchewan were voicing concerns after a story emerged last September that three masked suspects armed with handguns allegedly approached a farmhand in west-central Saskatchewan.

Shortly after, there were media reports of farmers carrying firearms during harvest. RCMP then urged people not to take the law into their own hands.