WESTLOCK — Westlock RCMP are continuing with several key initiatives in their annual priority plan (APP) this year and will make community engagement their number one focus in their 2024-2025 plan.
Those initiatives were highlighted for councillors during the Town of Westlock's May 27 regular council meeting, where they accepted the presentation as information.
Westlock RCMP Staff Sgt. Jeff Sehn, presented the quarterly RCMP report and included details of key initiatives identified in the 2023-2024 annual priority plan and provided a brief overview of next year’s plan.
This year’s RCMP APP initiatives involve intelligence-led policing, enhanced awareness and education, and workplace and employee wellness and respect, the latter of which focuses on training and support for RCMP members.
“We also kept track of our proactive interactions with prolific offenders. We brought this in October 2023 and we ended the year at the end of March,” said Sehn. “Monitoring 16 prolific offenders and laying 46 charges against them.”
He noted a third initiative, pertaining to warrant executions, began in December.
“We proactively executed warrants on 28 different offenders,” said Sehn, adding that RCMP attended several community events as part of the awareness and education priority, and tracked data between September 2023 and March 31, 2024.
Those events included 41 community connections, two town hall meetings, 16 meetings with elected officials and 47 meetings with stakeholders “for a total of 106 community engagements since September,” said Sehn, noting they “also completed 12 investigations specific media releases.”
“Moving into 2024-2025 our first priority’s going to be community engagement. Under that there’s going to be five initiatives,” explained Sehn, pointing out weekly rave alerts to crime prevention groups, an increase number of media releases, town hall meetings, youth and senior engagements and presentations as well as coffee with a cop.
The second priority next year will focus on prolific offenders and involve three initiatives, including proactive warrant executions and two others.
“We’re also going to continue with our proactive prolific offender interactions and we’re also going to be taking a project-based investigation approach towards profile offenders,” he said.
The third priority in the 2024-2025 APP pertains to mental health, substance abuse, and resource engagement, which will including increasing the use of the Health IM app, a provincially mandated app and an integrated mental health approach on high risk individuals.
“We’re going to take habitual offender management approach at mental health in the community. So (for) the individuals that require a high number of resources for mental health reasons, we’re going to be using a wrap-around approach in order to deal with them effectively.”
Sehn also highlighted several quality assurance items involving communication with victims and complainants and the addition and removal of items with the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) to ensure they are addressed in an appropriate and timely manner.
“Making sure we’re following up and updating them (victims and complainants) as frequently as possible,” said Sehn.
