U.S. Secret Service coming to town to train police in threat assessment

Edmonton police will get a lesson in identifying threats from the United States Secret Service next month.

Police Chief Rod Knecht said Thursday that the agency will be in Edmonton in late February to train Edmonton Police Service members in threat assessment techniques. It is, to his knowledge, the first time a Canadian law enforcement agency has trained with the service.

“We do threat assessments here in a number of areas,” Knecht said.

That can include threats against individuals, buildings, the police service and public officials.

“We’re just looking at some of the best practices (the secret service) do to see if there’s ways we can learn from them and what they’re doing down in the United States,” he said.

“They have a long history in that, they’re the experts certainly in the United States on that, so we thought we would take advantage of their offer to come up to Canada and provide instruction.”

The secret service is a federal law enforcement agency created in 1865 to suppress the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, the service’s website states.

It now carries out “integrated missions of protection and investigations.”

Most famously, the service is charged with protecting the president and other high-ranking officials.

It would not be the first time Alberta law enforcement and the secret service have worked together.

In December, a central Alberta

man was charged in an alleged $10-million Ponzi scheme involving the purchase, sale and rental of mobile light towers to customers in Canada and the United States.

Mounties said their Red Deer financial crimes unit worked closely with the United States Secret Service and the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or FINTRAC, throughout the investigation.

An RCMP member said the case may be the largest fraud file they’ve dealt with in central Alberta.

“The Red Deer RCMP’s crossborder collaboration with the U.S. Secret Service and our ongoing partnership with FINTRAC were vital to its successful conclusion,” a news release stated.