RCMP take new approach in rural areas
Rural crime spurs new RCMP approach to tackling root causes but wide open spaces pose an obstacle
Standing in a nearly empty Quonset on a northern Alberta farm, Lawrence Ference points to spots where his belongings used to be.
It’s just past 9:30 p.m. in mid- October and sleet is pooling in truck tire ruts carved in the mud outside.
Inside, under harsh fluorescent lights, the bison farmer’s giant black dog Dexx weaves in and out of his legs looking for pats or food, or both.
Minutes earlier, RCMP Sgt. James Morton watched a set of headlights disappear down a dirt road leading to the storage facility that sits deep in farm country about 40 kilometres east of St. Paul.
Morton, who heads up one of the four rural crime reduction teams in Alberta, worried something was off. So he pulled his unmarked RCMP truck around and headed into the night to investigate.
He found Ference packing up for the day and readying to head home, but he convinced the farmer to stick around and chat about a break-in a month earlier.
Ference’s old Ford diesel truck had been in the shed hooked up to a battery charger. They stole the battery charger, he says.
They also nabbed an impact wrench, a small generator, meat saw, some hunting knives and four brand new quad tires. All told, about $4,000 worth of gear.
“I knew god damn well those tires were going to be gone,” he said, kicking at the air. “I never used to be on edge about what’s been stolen or what’s broken into, but over the last three or four years, every time I come to the farm I’m thinking, what am I going to find?
“You’re never at ease anymore — never at ease — and it seems like it doesn’t matter what it is, they’ll steal whatever is not nailed down.”
They even stole the door off a nearby pump shed.
“I mean, who steals a door?” Ference asked.
It’s a story Morton has heard before. It’s part of the reason he is out there in the darkness.
Visible policing is part of his eastern Alberta rural crime team’s mandate; meeting and chatting with locals is key to what he and his team of eight officers are trying to achieve.
The job of designing a crime reduction plan for a vast swath of eastern Alberta fell to Morton early this year.
The provincial and federal governments were about to make $10 million available to the RCMP and Alberta Crown Prosecution Service to launch a new strategy to tackle crime across rural Alberta. The eastern district includes 27 detachments and stretches 1,000 kilometres north to south and 430 kilometres east to west.
The veteran officer looked around Canada for answers, but he also eyed a violence reduction program in Scotland in the wake of escalating knife crimes there in the early 2000s. At its core was the idea that violence should be treated as a symptom of something more complex. Morton reasoned that the same could be said about rural crime.
Rather than try to arrest their way out of a problem, the Scottish authorities looked at crime from a public health framework. (Knife crimes plummeted 69 per cent in the decade since the program launched in 2005).
“You have to look at the root causes of why rural crime happens,” Morton said driving his RCMP truck down a pitted and potholefilled road east of St. Paul, where the eastern rural crime unit is based about 200 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.
Whether it’s poverty, unemployment, addictions issues, lack of education, historical trauma, lack of family and positive role models, focusing attention on the root causes gives police a chance — even if it is a slight chance — of making a difference, said Morton.
That’s why part of the initiative is focused on offender management and building relationships with support services.
The theory is simple: If a person is arrested and charged, shipped off to remand for six to eight months and then released, the likelihood of reoffending is high. If you can offer services, from rehab to employment advice, maybe you can change behaviours.
Morton ponders: “How successful am I going to be with a Grade 8 education and no fixed address and no job and I suffer from drug and alcohol addiction? I can probably be successful if I address some of those root causes but can I work to address them if I don’t know where to start and when I am stuck with addictions?”
“Crime reduction is essentially finding solutions to break the cycle and find the root causes of the cycle of crime to be committed,” he adds.
Offender management is, however, just one of the pillars of the initiative.
As long as farmers have lived on the land, there have been people out there stealing from them.
What feels different in 2018 is the way rural crime is talked about via social media and the passion that it stirs — call it the amplification effect of social media.
Morton gets why people are so passionate about protecting their property.
“Rural crime is definitely a problem. It has always been a problem. But I don’t think it’s significantly worse,” he said.
“But it hurts people and it has long-lasting effects.”
A recent report from Statistics Canada looking at rural crime paints a gloomy picture.
For instance, Alberta’s rural crime rate last year was 38 per cent higher than the province’s urban crime rate. In Manitoba that number was 42 per cent. In Saskatchewan it was 36 per cent higher.
The same rural crime report went onto say that “almost half of crime in Canada’s rural areas occurred in these three provinces, which accounted for about a quarter of Canada’s population served by rural police services.”
Morton has attended his own town hall events in an effort to inform angry and frustrated rural residents about the crime initiative and to hear what’s going on in their proverbial neck of the woods.
He thinks his message is coming across, but frustration still remains.
There is, however, also understanding of the paradox of distance: there may be fewer places to steal from in rural Alberta but there also are fewer police to patrol such a vast area, sometimes giving the upper hand to the crooks.
And those criminals are not just your run of the mill addiction-addled culprits looking for whatever they can pawn for a quick fix.
Police have heard that some are using drones to scope out properties from the air while others drive the back roads and drop pins on Google Maps cataloguing farm equipment or recreational gear like quads and boats. Some trawl Facebook to see who’s on holidays and who is not at home.
That’s why the initiative didn’t just sprinkle 32 RCMP members randomly across more than 100 detachments in Alberta and hope for the best.
Instead, the teams were created with a four-pillar mandate: apprehension, suppression, offender management and targeted crime prevention, which aims to reduce crime by targeting chronic offenders, or the five per cent who commit 95 per cent of the crimes.
Or as RCMP Supt. Peter Tewfik likes to say: “Arresting those causing the most grief in communities.”
Tewfik, the man who oversees the provincial project, said the creation of the units allows detachmentlevel members to deal with more serious investigations and lets the designated crime units stay on task at all times.
The four teams each recruited officers out of a variety of units across the province with expertise in areas ranging from judicial authorizations to search warrants and source handling.
Those teams developing targeted enforcement plans work independently from the regular detachment officers, but they also assist those detachments when their paths inevitably cross in the line of duty.
Part of the $10-million funding is to build intelligence capacity and run a data centre that takes some of the paperwork off the officers, giving them more time and flexibility for policing, Tewfik said.
“We don’t want those resources to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of policing. That’s not going to help us deal with some of these criminals that are multijurisdictional,” he said.
“If we target those people who are harming us the most and we have tools that are going to help us disrupt that criminal activity we are going to have an impact on crime rates.”
The recurring rural crime initiative funding, for both RCMP and the Crown, will be reviewed each year and adjusted as required going forward, Alberta Justice spokesperson Katherine Thompson said.
The funding earmarked for the RCMP is intended to cover the Government of Alberta’s share of additional RCMP positions, she said.
Each of the four districts is taking a slightly different approach to its crime reduction goals.
The eastern district’s Morton has taken a very public and highly visible approach that harkens back to days of beat cops pounding the pavement. That includes directing patrols to hot spots.
The presence of uniformed officers deters thieves, but it also ties in with the local crime reduction strategy of chatting with locals to help target enforcement.
“Some of the people we are targeting are affecting all of our systems from health care, social services, justice and there are lots of cases where justice is not the right system to be treating the problems they have,” Tewfik said.
Crime reduction is essentially finding solutions to break the cycle and find the root causes of the cycle of crime to be committed.