BARRHEAD - Crime in the Barrhead RCMP Detachment's service area is mainly on the decline, according to 'K' Division's second quarter (April, May and June) statistics compared to the same period over the last five years.
Barrhead's new detachment commander, Sgt. Collin Hack, and Cpl. Filipe Vicente gave Town of Barrhead councillors the good news during their Sept. 10 meeting.
"Overall, the numbers are looking good," Vicente said, adding the number of criminal matters dropped from 308 in 2023 to 243 in 2024.
On the persons crime front, the detachment saw a slight increase compared to the same period in 2003, going up by eight per cent, going 64 to 69 complaints. Assaults led the way at 44, followed by criminal harassment, uttering threats, kidnapping and abduction and sexual assault at 11, 10, 3 and 1, respectively.
Only assaults saw a noticeable increase, going from 44 to 29 in 2023, while the other categories remained stable or showed slight decreases.
"A lot of those [assaults] were domestic, father and son type of thing and relatively minor incidents," Vicente said.
On the property crime side, police responded to 126 complaints in the second quarter, compared to 166 in 2023, a 24 per cent decrease.
Theft under $5,000 led the way with 36 complaints, followed by mischief (damage to property), fraud, motor vehicle theft, and break-and-enters at 24, 20, 16, and 14. The bottom categories are possession of stolen goods, mischief (other) theft over $5,000, and arson at 9, 4, 2, and 1.
The categories showing the greatest improvement were thefts under $5,000, which went from 71 in 2023 to 36 in 2024.
Break-and-enters also saw a dramatic drop in the second quarters of each year, going from 24 in 2023 to 14 in 2024.
"And of those 14, only five happened in the Town of Barrhead, five in the County of Barrhead. The remaining complaints were in Woodlands County," Vicente said.
Regrettably, the fraud category is bucking the trend, increasing with the second quarter stats increasing 186 per cent since 2020.
"To be honest, most of them are not being reported," Vicente said. Despite all the education and the push to make people more aware of scams, we still see everything from people being taken advantage of on Facebook buy-and-sell pages and bitcoin investments to grandparent scams from 20 to 30 years ago, which are still going strong."
Coun. Dausen Kluin asked Vicente what he thought was the cause for the drop in property crime.
"Right now, there are a couple of people that were causing us a lot of grief in the Town of Barrhead that are in custody, and two more that are on house arrest that we continue to do curfew checks on, that if they were free and out, would definitely increase some of these numbers," Vicente replied. "It is something we've said before: if we kept some of these people in jail, you would see a drastic drop in the numbers."
Annual Performance Plan progress
Vicente said one of the priorities of the detachment's Annual Performance Plan was offender management.
He added that in the second three months of 2024, members performed 68 compliance checks on a handful of previous offenders, resulting in six breaches.
The APP is a document that outlines the detachment's policing priorities. It is created by the local RCMP detachment, with input from the municipal governments that it serves, as part of the police force's public engagement component.
Vicente admitted they are not as far along on the police visibility and public engagement, attributing much of that to staffing, but now that Hack has arrived, he said they are planning to host multiple community events.
Almost fully staffed
With Hack's arrival on Aug. 1, the department is close to being fully staffed, and the detachment is short, with just one regular duty constable. For a community of Barrhead's size and population, the RCMP consider 10 to be a full roster, which consists of seven general duty constables, one corporal and a detachment commander.
The wildfire season did present its challenges, though, Vicente said..
"What looked like it was going to be an easy summer, it started to pick up, and we had many of our members deployed, not only to Jasper but other places across the province," he said. "That put a lot of pressure, not only on our detachment but many other detachments."
However, now that residents in Jasper and other communities, Vicente said there would be less need to draw resources from other detachments.
He also noted that the federal government announced that Kananaskis will be the site of the 2025 G7 Summit in June. The G7 is an informal grouping of seven of the world's advanced economies, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union.
As a result, Vicente suspects that detachments Canada-wide will be called on to commit resources, which, depending on the wildfire season, could make scheduling for many detachments another challenging summer.
Hack agreed, calling the summit a significant undertaking for the RCMP.
"Five members have already been assigned just to help with planning," he said. "We don't have a lot of say in it. It will be up to the big bosses, but we will try to keep as many members here as possible."
Mayor Dave McKenzie, a retired RCMP member, said when Canada last hosted the summit in 2001, half of the detachment was temporarily transferred to help with the event.
Barry Kerton, TownandCountryToday.com
