The Athabasca RCMP Detachment will be starting up the Citizens on Patrol (COPs) program in the hope of reducing the crime rate in the area.
“We had a detachment meeting and one of the things that came up as part of our initiative to reduce the crime rate in the area is to have volunteer patrol groups,” said RCMP Const. Vanessa Lee, Athabasca’s liaison officer for the program.
“So, I contacted the Alberta Citizens on Patrol program and I was in contact with the president of the program.”
COPs is a province-wide program that attempts to, according to their brochure, “build safer communities by mobilizing citizens throughout Alberta to participate in community-based crime prevention.”
In essence, volunteers from the community become the “eyes and ears” of the police – patrolling local neighbourhoods and calling the RCMP when there’s a problem.
“We’re not looking for vigilantism,” said Lee. “Whenever (the volunteers) see something suspicious happening, for example a theft in progress, they do not get out of their vehicle. But, what they do is they contact us and we attend the scene and deal with it.”
Volunteers will patrol Athabasca in teams of two — one driving and one keeping an eye on things. At the moment, Lee doesn’t know how often the volunteers will be out in the community, but it won’t be more than a few hours each week.
The first step, however — before anything is fully planned — is to find volunteers from Athabasca and surrounding area.
“The interest must be coming from the community. We can’t really tell the community ‘OK, we need volunteers. Let’s do it,’” she explained. “This program, what essentially it does is that it gathers all the community members together and among those members, they select the leader (and) they do all the administrative stuff.”
“We, as RCMP, are only a supporting body to that group.”
Volunteers must be over the age of 18 and be able to pass a criminal record check.
“There’s going to be a recruitment process,” she said. “(But) those things are going to be talked about during the meeting.”
There will be a meeting within the next little bit with a COPs leader and liaison officer from Westlock coming to explain the program, but Lee says they’ll be waiting for people to sign up before they make any concrete plans.
“I don’t have the date yet, but I need to have a certain number of people so that I can advise Westlock for their attendance,” she explained. “And I have to coordinate the date and time with them, too.”
Anyone interested in taking part in the program is asked to contact Lee at the Athabasca RCMP detachment 780-675-5122.
