WESTLOCK — Doing a better job of following up on reports of crime with the victims, making an effort to reduce youth involvement in crime as both victims and perpetrators, improving response times and increasing patrols in rural areas, and educating vulnerable people like seniors about more sophisticated scams were among the priorities for the local RCMP identified by Westlock County councillors at their Feb. 27 meeting.
Chief administrative officer Tony Kulbisky said that each year during the month of March, RCMP detachments develop annual performance plans that are used to guide the detachment's activities during the upcoming fiscal year.
Prior to developing these performance plans, detachments conduct consultations with stakeholders to identify their concerns. The Westlock RCMP have recently conducted two such sessions at the Westlock Library on Feb. 1 and at the Vimy Community Hall on Feb. 21.
However, Staff Sgt. Jeff Sehn had also sent Kulbisky an e-mail requesting that Westlock County council forward any priorities to him before March 10, which prompted him to put it on the Feb. 27 meeting agenda.
Coun. Sherri Provencal said she would like the RCMP to do more follow-up on reports of crime called in by residents.
“They want our residents to report, and it’s very important that they respond to these reports," she said, adding that one of the issues people have had with reporting to the RCMP is that they don't feel they are actually followed up on.
“There’s a big benefit to actually reporting, and that could actually mean more boots on the ground for us as a county when they get all their records together," she said.
Reeve Christine Wiese identified an additional related issue from a discussion she had with Coun. Francis Cloutier: a lot of people fail to realize that the RCMP are calling them back because it's an unknown number.
Some people, she said, have calls from unknown numbers blocked on their phones. As a result, people are saying they don't hear back from the RCMP even though the police are actually calling them.
Wiese suggested they may need to get more info out to the public about how the police will get in touch with them and that they may need to disable the apps that are blocking those calls.
She then brought up another priority: knowing that there is a problem particularly in the Fawcett area with youth involvement in crime on both ends, she said she would like to see the RCMP try to reduce that involvement.
Wiese noted that Family and Community Services (FCSS) has a mentorship program and it may be beneficial fro the RCMP to feed into that program to reach the youth and warn them about things like "sextortion" (ie. the blackmailing of online victims to provide illicit images).
Noting that he recognized that the RCMP have strained resources and it's hard to get from one end of the county to the other, Coun. Isaac Skuban said his priority would be improving response times.
Skuban added that, in his area at least, it feels like the RCMP serve more as an investigative unit than a crime prevention force.
Coun. Stuart Fox-Robinson said he would like to echo Skuban's priority, adding that there is more need for the RCMP getting involved in the community and being more visible in rural areas. And while RCMP resources are strained, he pointed out that this is "the world that we live in."
Provencal said she knew a lot of crime was occurring at late hours when RCMP officers would not be on patrol, and wondered if it would be possible for the police to co-ordinate more with the county's peace officers or Citizens on Patrol (COP) to increase visibility.
“Personally, if I was driving down a back road and see the RCMP (at 3 a.m.), I might not want to break into the place right there," she said.
Wiese added one more priority of preventing vulnerable people from being targeted by scams, noting that with the advent of AI and the ease with which technology can be used to re-create voices and images, these scams are getting more sophisticated.
"A lot of our seniors are getting scammed quite a bit," she said.
Ultimately, councillors passed a motion directing administration to provide the Westlock RCMP with a list of the priorities.
