A 37-year-old man sits atop the list of social chronic offenders that the Prince George RCMP have been dealing with on a consistent basis.
According to police, he’s been involved in 151 police files and spent over 100 days or nights in cells sobering up during a one-year period that has over one thousand similar cases.
From Sept. 1, 2018, to Aug. 31, 2019, the top ten social chronic offenders have been subjects of 1,045 police reports.
In less than a decade, the 37-year-old has been the subject of over 1,100 police files and spent the equivalent of more than a year in jail sobering up.
A 59-year-old female has the second most contacts with police from that same one-year period with 112, followed by a 33-year-old male with 91 contacts.
“They don’t need police help, they need health professional help more than anything. We deal a lot of resources on each one of them and they spend a lot of time in cells sobering up because nobody else is available to take care of them, and they certainly can’t take care of themselves. That responsibility should fall on others other than the police.”
Douglass added that these calls for service take a considerable amount of police resources in each case and require immediate response by frontline officers, sometimes taking them away from other investigations. Once in cells, the individual must be constantly monitored by staff and RCMP supervisors until they are sober enough to be released.
On Wednesday, Oct. 23, monthly income assistance payments were issued to those in need.  This is often the busiest day of the month for police in most communities.  From 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., eight people were lodged in Prince George Detachment cells exclusively for being drunk by alcohol and not being able to care of themselves.
With the lack of resources available to help these addicted individuals, the Prince George RCMP state that they will continue to work with community partners to develop a better option to help these persons deal with their intoxication and ultimately, their addictions.
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