ATHABASCA – If you have a security camera that faces the outside of your property, the Athabasca RCMP have a pitch for you — the Community Assisted Policing Through Use of Recorded Evidence (CAPTURE) program can help the Mounties know where they can turn when crime occurs.
CAPTURE, launched province-wide this past summer, is a digital map of existing surveillance footage in a given area; when a crime takes place, the police can turn to the program to know who may have caught evidence on surveillance footage, instead of canvassing door-to-door.
“This is a fantastic program, and it’ll help the community a lot of we can get the buy-in that we need,” said Athabasca RCMP Const. Kyle Hotchkiss. “If we can get a real CCTV map built of the area, just even officer workload would get cut down by 30 to 40 per cent.”
While the Athabasca detachment is starting the program in Calling Lake and the M.D. of Opportunity No. 17 right now, Hotchkiss said they’re expecting to start it up in the areas around town in the new year. According to Hotchkiss, the program can make a huge difference outside of town where first-hand accounts are few and far between.
“When we’re in Athabasca there’s enough people moving around that we can usually identify at least one eyewitness or person that saw a vehicle or something in relation to the offence, and on top of that businesses usually have a lot of CCTV,” said Hotchkiss.
“When we talk about cameras in private residences, rural areas are really where we want to target. Oftentimes when properties don’t have CCTV, we respond to the incident and there’s nothing we can do because no one’s seen anything, no one has a description, and our evidence is so limited.”
Organizations like rural crime watches can help but they aren’t able to tackle the problem on their own. Garth Kohlsmith, Alberta Citizens on Patrol Association president, has been involved in community crime prevention for the last 13 years, primarily in the towns and villages of Westlock County.
“I was in Vimy for a patrol out there, and I didn’t see a lot of cameras. We don’t see as many in the smaller towns and communities,” said Kohlsmith, who’s also the president of Westlock’s Citizens on Patrol group.
“It makes things better for the police, it’s easier for them to catch people. I manage condos here, and we’ve caught quite a few people just from the cameras who were trying to steal stuff. It does work,” he said.
A common question, according to the RCMP, has been access, prompting questions about privacy and ‘Big Brother.’
“People are concerned that the police have access to your video footage whenever they want, and that’s not the point of the program,” said Hotchkiss. “We have no access to your footage unless you provide it to us, all you’re doing is letting us know if you have a camera and where it’s pointing. We still need your permission for us to access that footage.”
The program is also live in Westlock and Barrhead; anyone interested in registering their CCTV cameras in participating communities can do so here.
