The City’s Standing Committee on Public Safety discussed promoting the Citizens on Patrol program as well as Block Watch programs in the City.
“Volunteers are essentially professional eye witnesses,” explained Director of Administrative Services Eric Depenau.
“They have a link with the RCMP in the event of an incident. It’s important to note that Citizens on Patrol is not intended to replace regular police or private licenced security patrol services, but allow the RCMP to instead direct their focus to other areas of criminal activity.”
Depenau said the program operates under the guidance of the RCMP’s Community Policing Section.
It was noted there are currently 16 volunteers within the Citizens on Patrol program, and had as many as 30.
“For the size of the City of Prince George, we need to have a lot more than 30 volunteers,” said Mayor Simon Yu.
Depeneau spoke on some potential ways to promote the programs.
“Potential linkages to the website, the City may consider hosting on the webpage more dedicated community policing materials, try to make that more prominent, try to push that out and create more linkages for the recruitment,”
“An awareness campaign, so looking at more opportunities there, there’s a comment that right now a lot of the materials are in print and perhaps support with videography and things like the City’s communication department to help promote and create some of those local materials could be something that’s explored.”
Depeneau added some community events have booths set up with information on the program.
“If this is an area that we’re getting direction to have more of an emphasis, then perhaps there could be more event attendance and more of those recruitment initiatives,” he said.
“Same as attending job fairs, currently we make a point of attending the University of Northern BC’s annual job fair, but there are more.”
Depenau added there’s been commentary that existing materials on the programs are a bit dated, and updating them could be looked at.
Councillor Brian Skakun said Facebook could be a resource as well.
“Sometimes you see posts of people supposedly stealing things and I think ‘oh my god, I hope you got the right person,” he said.
“But you look at the things, what they’re doing with the porch pirates, stealing packages, warning people in their neighbourhoods about what’s going on late at night, I’m not suggesting we take it on, but it should be nice to somehow support what they’re doing indirectly.”
Yu also asked if there was an opportunity to use the Community Clean Up day to promote the program as well.
“Maybe this is also the day that we encourage the citizens while they’re picking up their neighbourhood garbage together to perhaps talk to each other, to make sure that they recognize we have a program,” he said.
“We need to treat this as almost a community campaign, a sustainable campaign on a monthly basis.”
Assistant Manager of Police Support Services Krystal Devauld also brought up the idea of having “block parties” where they would promote the block watch.
“The block watch programs does provide some funds for that party to try to get people out,” she said.
Councillor Ron Polillo made a motion to refer the item to City Council for consideration on opportunities for promotion.
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