Prince George City Council heard an update on the kind of year 2024 was for the Prince George RCMP at last night’s (Monday) meeting.
Prince George RCMP Superintendent Darin Rappel presented stats from last year, which showed there was a downward trend in the number of files last year.
There was also a roughly 30 per cent increase in the number of prisoners last year.
“Part of that is the work that the Downtown Safety Unit does, that’s proactive work, their mandate is to go downtown, look for wanted persons or others that are avoiding arrest, and they have a lot of success there as well, so those people will make their way into jail at some point,” Rappel said.
“Some portion of this increase can also be attributed to the proactive work of the POP team or Problem Oriented Policing team, so they too do a targeted enforcement, by example, some of the successful boosts and busts that we’ve done where we work with some of our retail stores in town and the loss prevention officers there and we can have additional arrests, upwards of a dozen in a day.”
Rappel added there are some people who are arrested repeatedly, but the jail is not the best place for them.
“They struggle with addiction issues, and there is also difficulty dealing with them with other support agencies in town, so other social services agencies have a difficult time with them, whether that be due to violence or intimidation or things along those lines,” he said.
“Obviously we continue to work with those individuals, taking them through the situation tables and others, but more often than not they do find themselves back in jail.”
Rappel also spoke on the Lower Patricia Boulevard encampment.
“The population of this encampment is now down to only a few people as most have accepted housing,” Rappel said.
“The role for the RCMP will be to assist if necessary in a court ordered closure of the Lower Patricia Boulevard encampment, but it might not be necessary at all for the police to become involved given the number of housing resources that are available.”
Rappel noted property crime is down this year as well.
“It has been anecdotally suggested that there’s crime reporting fatigue and maybe that’s a reason that you might see a downward trend there, but that’s difficult to determine with any certainty,” he explained.
“It could also be part of the population dynamics, the change in that, because people are taking advantage of social housing and that might be correlated with a reduction as well.”
Rappel also spoke on the rollout of body worn cameras in the detachment.
“We expect through this there will be more timely resolution to public complaints, and to demonstrate transparency to other agencies such as the IIO, and it will collect value added evidence that we’ll be able to Crown Counsel,” he said.
“But there is an increase to the volume of work to police, and certainly to Crown Counsel, and it’s not been sufficiently addressed or fully understood, but that’s simply because we’re early days, we are wave zero, so we’re learning a few things and we’re going to be building the bridge as we’re crossing it.”
Rappel added the amount of video can be overwhelming.
“The video has to be transcribed, it has to be vetted, ultimately disclosed, it’s labour intensive and it’s costly in both financial resources as well as the time Crown Counsel will have to routinely invest to address this volume of work,” he said.
Rappel said he’s also looking forward to working more in high schools in 2025.
“Our secondary school population of high school is about 5,500, that’s a very large number of kids,” he said.
“We investigate offences that involve students that occur in school or on school property, as well as away from the property. This can include some very significant investigations, assault, harassment, intimidation, robbery, trafficking, in one instances, trafficking that’s led to a death. So we’re increasing our training and workshops that we’re going to do with the schools to make them aware of things like online harms, the dangers of organized crime, and other behaviours that directly impact our youth.”
Rappel added the RCMP will be doing a condensed version of the Youth Academy over spring break this year.
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