Solving crimes matter of focus
Top Mountie says police face more social problems than criminal complaints
The most pressing problem for the Penticton RCMP is not crime, but the perception of crime, according to the detachment’s top cop.
“Why do we have this perception that there’s some kind of danger when the facts of the matter say it’s almost non-existent when we look at that from a violent crime perspective?” Supt. Ted De Jager told a crowd of about 70 people who showed up for the annual community policing forum Wednesday at Penticton Trade and Convention Centre. About 60 per cent of the calls for service to Penticton police are non-criminal matters, he said numerous times.
“What we are dealing with is poverty and mental health, addictions and homelessness. The people that are causing a majority of people to think our community is unsafe — which it is not unsafe — these are the people we need to focus our efforts on.”
THE NUMBERS
De Jager laid out some numbers to bolster his assertion about the perception problem.
Violent crime makes up about four per cent of the Penticton RCMP’s total calls for service, with the violent crime rate itself dropping 18 per cent from 2016 to 2017, he said.
And Penticton has seen a 14 per cent drop in property crime, year to date, for 2018.
“Which is the only community in the Okanagan that has experienced that,” he added.
“I think the police and you and all of our partners working together are starting to do a good job.”
PARTNERS
A panel including representatives from Interior Health, Pathways Addictions Resource Centre, School District 67, and the South Okanagan Women in Need Society (SOWINS) was on the stage with him, although De Jager fielded mostly RCMP-specific, pre-screened questions for the first 40 minutes of the forum.
He said the way forward for the region is working with the community partners on the panel.
SD67 superintendent Wendy Hyer said over the past year the district’s relationship with the RCMP has improved, a sentiment echoed by SOWINS and Pathways.
MISCONCEPTIONS
De Jager took the opportunity to address some common misconceptions about Penticton RCMP.
“You are the ones that direct us. There’s a lot of talk out there about Ottawa tells us what to do; Ottawa tells me what my uniform looks like,” De Jager said.
Penticton is not a dangerous community, he continued, adding that Penticton’s No. 16 rank in a Maclean’s data analysis of Canada’s most dangerous communities doesn’t tell the full story.
“To me — what’s a nice way to say this? — quite a misrepresentation and an indication to me that the person who wrote that article doesn’t understand how crime statistics work,” De Jager said.
The idea crime is coming from transient homeless populations doesn’t add up either, he continued, saying the statistics show the vast majority of homeless people in Penticton are from here.
“There may be one or two (imported criminals), that may happen, but this wholesale belief that crime or social disorder is being imported isn’t really a fact,” De Jager said.
Daryl Meyers, agency director for Pathways, said much of the transient worker population that comes in the summer is in need of housing.
“The majority of the people who are homeless here have been in Penticton for a long time,” Meyers said.
ANY QUESTIONS?
Less of a back-and-forth with the audience and more of an information session, the 30 pre-screened questions, some with four or five sub-questions, took up much of the two-hour event.
Roughly half of the crowd walked out around 8:30 p.m. when informed there were still half of the pre-submitted questions to get through before the promised open mic period.
“I noticed that some people left early, again, that’s fine,” De Jager said. “If you do have questions I would encourage them to come to me either at Coffee with a Cop or one of our more formal mechanisms coming to one of the detachments to ensure we can answer those questions.”
Those formal mechanisms include a new email and website for the RCMP coming down the line making it easier to get questions or concerns in to police.
While the forum questions were prescreened, they weren’t necessarily favourable towards the RCMP, however they were paraphrased in the interest of time.
SAFE INJECTION SITE
When the open mic was available at the end of the night, Gerry Neilsen asked if there was any plan for a supervised injection site in Penticton, noting the amount of needles being found, some near schools.
SOWINS executive director Debbie Scarborough expressed support for the idea.
“If we could have a safe injection site (or) overdose prevention site, we could eliminate some of the crime that people do to get their drugs,” Scarborough said.
She also said something everyone in the community can do to curb crime and fatal drug use is support those kinds of sites, to a round of applause.
Hyer noted kids in schools are being educated not to go near needles and are presented safety programs, while Meyers said Pathways’ Sharps Task Force is going to be putting out a community plan soon.
OPTICS
Neilsen acknowledged afterwards that not all of the problems in Penticton are the responsibility of RCMP, but argued the optics aren’t good right now.
“They have to paint a good picture, right?” Neilsen said.
“Looking at statistics historically, it tells you about the past, but what I see going forward is there’s more people on the street, more people shooting up.”