ATHABASCA – Athabasca Citizens on Patrol (COP) president Rod Kerr said it will take a unified community effort to fight rural crime.
Kerr was at the Town of Athabasca council meeting Dec. 17 and reported on his attendance at the Building Capacity in Rural Crime Prevention training and offered an update on the installation of surveillance cameras in downtown Athabasca.
Kerr said the event, held Nov. 28 and 29 in Red Deer, included information about achieving a balance between policing and a multi-sectoral approach of regional projects, government lobbying and positive ticketing public safety events.
“(It was) a comprehensive approach to bringing a community together, to working together and everybody's on the same page such as FCSS, the hospitals, the school systems, even (service clubs),” Kerr explained. “I mean, everybody in Athabasca that has any relationship with the community needs to be involved in the crime reduction.”
The Town of Athabasca and Athabasca County will be taking part in the pilot project that is funded by the Alberta Ministry of Justice. Other municipalities in the project include Calling Lake, Lac La Biche County, the Town of Peace River, the City of Wetaskiwin, the Town of Beiseker, and Sunchild First Nation.
“It looks to me like they didn't throw a lot of money at it; it was $200,000 for this pilot project,” Kerr said. “They're implementing a lot of these community projects and these folks that are doing that are happy to come up and talk to people; to put on forums to help the communities involved put this whole program together.”
Kerr noted the program will not focus on policing, but on networking and municipalities coming up with their own ways to combat crime.
"Policing is an integral part of it,” Kerr stated. “But mostly, it's a social network where we can help to alleviate some of the problems that are going on in our society that are creating this. One of the problems of course is a lack of employment in Alberta.”
Kerr added Lac La Biche will be coordinating some of the program through their administration before talking about how drugs are a large part of the problem.
"One of the most important things that we identified in that final project for our communities was the problems of drugs,” Kerr explained. "A lot of the rural crime and the situations that are happening in our community and Lac La Biche is created because of drug use, namely meth.”
Kerr said one strategy is to make sure young people have things to do and a lot of support as they're going through high school and coming out of it.
Athabasca County Coun. Dwayne Rawson wants to start a justice committee, and Kerr stated he will be working on that too.
“I can't really speak to what he's doing in specifics,” Kerr said. “He believes if the offenders start with the first crime and if we can stop them at the first crime that we can help them to not go into that cycle.”
He said the project could create more lobbying opportunities as projects are identified that the participating municipalities feel the need to happen adding there could be money from the government in some form.
Town of Athabasca Coun. Ida Edwards also attended the two-day event in Red Deer and added her own notes to the discussion later in the meeting.
“This will lead to some budget costs for committee cost,” Edwards noted. “And if we decide on some community projects based on recommendations from this program, basically, what they're asking us to do is with crime, reduction or prevention is to have to two pathways.”
Edwards explained the first pathway is situational, meaning to restrict the ability to commit crimes.
"An example of this is having blue lights in (public) bathrooms because it's hard to see your veins if you're doing drugs,” Edwards described. “Or you have white light, which is very bright in areas that you consider a hotspot (for crime) as opposed to the softer yellow lights.”
The social prevention part is more holistic and entails partnering with social services in the community.
“That works with healthy home environments, parenting, addressing social economic advantages or disadvantages, working with the schools,” Edwards continued. “And having a strong and good relationship with our police and enforcement.”
Edwards also explained to council about the importance of environmental design in helping to prevent crime citing Langley B.C. as a municipality already enforcing the design.
“A simple example of what that is, is your plants will either be up to a foot and a half high, or they'll be clear for eight feet (up the trunk) so if you have big trees you can't hide behind them,” she said. “It looks at the designs and fencing (and) they're looking at the designs in the layout and being able to scan and make sure people are seen.”
The Building Capacity in Rural Crime Prevention will give the pilot communities two years to develop workable ideas and collaborate on ways to reduce rural crime.
COP cameras
Before Kerr left the meeting, he spoke about the cameras COP wants to have placed at the intersection of 50th Avenue and 50th Street.
“We've been looking at complete solar cameras because of some of the implications with hooking up to the power in the streetlights and all sorts of costs involved,” he said. “We've gone down there and looked at the poles and there is one pole — it does have power for the Christmas decorations on it already which may work fine.”
Kerr stressed COP have not been dragging their heels on having the cameras installed.
“We're just trying to make sure that we do it properly so that the RCMP can have what they need,” he stressed. “One interesting thing about it is that any officers that are on duty will actually be able to dial into this camera system on their RCMP issued phones.”
Kerr said his group has already spoken to the district office of Alberta Transportation and Fortis about the logistics.
"We do need to have some type of memo because Citizens on Patrol is quite prepared to pay for the maintenance costs and electricity and everything else, but they will not deal with us directly; they will only deal with you guys,” Kerr explained. “So, we need to have some kind of a memorandum of understanding (and) you guys will take care of the costs, if there's any of them, and then we would reimburse you.”
Mayor Colleen Powell told Kerr to send her an e-mail outlining what he is looking for in the MOU for the council to discuss at a future meeting.
