Police Paint Picture Of Rampant Crime Problems Needing More Funding To Fight
By Robert Thomas
“I grew up in Moose Jaw. I never locked my doors. I never thought this type of stuff would happen,” Sergeant Taylor Elder of the Moose Jaw Police Service (MJPS) told a special meeting of Moose Jaw City Council on Tuesday afternoon.
The MJPS was at the meeting to present their 2023 Budget to Council.
A request which would see the MJPS spending a budgeted $13,439,566 which when predicted revenues of $1,658,507 are included will see the MJPS spending $11,781,059 or an increase of 5.49 percent ($612,933) from the $11,168,126 for 2022.
It works out to a 1.84 percent increase in the municipal mill rate.
An increase the MJPS told Council is needed to finally have the resources and the funding to attack a drugs, guns and gang driven crime wave the city has been experiencing over the last few years.
Last year the MJPS requested a 5.58 percent budget increase to help in the fight against rising crime.
Elder, who is 13 year veteran of the MJPS, described as a situation that has just exploded over the last six months after 12.5 years of relative calm.
Sergeant Taylor Elder addresses City Council during the presentation of the MJPS 2022-2023 Budget request as Chief of Police Rick Bourassa looks on - MJ Independent photo
“We rarely saw a gun. We maybe saw a gun now and again but in the last six months I have had to text my wife twice to say shots fired I’m OK,” Elder said, adding “I just wanted to put that point down and let everyone know we are doing our best to keep the city of Moose Jaw safe.”
“The Friendly City isn’t what it is anymore. The trends are changing we are having dangerous people come from out of town and set up shop and really you know put our public safety in jeopardy.”
Elder’s thoughts about the severity of crime that has been showing its ugly head which needs to be dealt with was a message backed up by Chief Rick Bourassa.
“This is the direction we have been moving in to keep our community safe. We have had some of these issues that have been there for awhile but now we are able to deal with them and bring them out into the light,” Chief Bourassa said.
Bourassa would go on to list the various other concerns the MJPS is attempting to deal with which ranged from rampant child exploitation, to gangs, drugs (crystal methamphetamine) as well as the modern resources needed to help keep officers on the street and not in the police station filling out reports.
For Sergeant Elder the tactical team is one of the keys to cleaning up the streets.
“So now with the addition of the tactical response team we now have better equipment and some officers who are trained to deal with these high risk offenders and offences…these are things that are happening everyday…but all of these jobs were are doing we are doing off of the side of our desk,” he said.
It needs to be noted the MJPS largely developed its Tactical Team capabilities in an opaque environment and did not publicly announce the expenditures (a reliable confidential source told MJ Independent the amount spent was $100,000) or advances in the team’s formation.
Attempts to find out the reasons for the team to be formed by way of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests were thwarted by simply redacting entire reports.
Elder asked for more resources to help keep up with the changes and growth in crime in the community.
“We are here to ensure public safety. All of our officers are wearing two, three and four different hats and we are doing our best to maintain public safety but it is getting harder and getting more difficult to keep up with the trends.”
The MJPS is requesting two additional officers to be funded by the Province to help deal with the policing challenges being felt at the present time.
MJPS Chief Rick Bourassa addresses Tuesday afternoon’s special meeting of Council to make the annual address to ask Council to approve the MJPS’s latest annual budget - MJ Independent photo
For Chief Bourassa keeping up with the criminal trends and the MJPS doing a more efficient job entails a larger than normal capital expenditure this coming year.
Technology Upgrades Seen As The Key To Efficiency - Cost $235,000
The MJPS is asking for two main technology upgrades in the budget request - computer enabled dispatching and the police being able to fill out reports in the field using the laptop computer in their vehicles.
The computer enabled dispatch will allow for photographs, descriptions and other information to be sent directly to officers in the field. Officers will not have to return to the police station to pick up the information.
“Everything will be controlled by computers and the transfer of information will be so much more enhanced then it is right now,” Chief Bourassa said.
The other ability technology will create is the ability to create police reports in the field and not have to return to the station to file reports.
“This will enable the in car reporting abilities so our officers will be in the community far more than they are now. There will be much less demands on them to come to police headquarters and the building to complete some of this paperwork,” he said.
The MJPS is presently preparing for the upgrades and the majority of the funding would be for licensing the necessary software.
“Our current reporting system has not been updated for several decades,” Chief Bourassa said, adding “and it is very far behind. We have been working diligently this year and we have budget money in there to get that system up to speed where it should be. We anticipate that should be done within the next few weeks.”
“At that point we will be enabled to start moving forward with technological upgrades that will keep our police officers in the community rather than in our building”
The MJPS want to spend $235,000 in order to bring these technology areas up to speed or introduce them to allow officers to be more efficient and present on the street.
Provincial Pedo Problems
Internet Child Exploitation (child pornography possession, making sharing and adults luring children on-line) is a major problem in Moose Jaw Chief Bourassa said. A problem which needs to be addressed first and foremost.
“Internet child exploitation is something we are working on. We have two members trained and equipped to do that. We believe additional (provincial) resources would be very helpful,” he said.
Internet Child Exploitation rates in major Saskatchewan centres - source MJPS report to Council
Having more officers has allowed the MJPS to start to tackle the very labour intensive drugs, firearms and gang activity in the community.
“It involves a lot of work behind the scenes in terms of gathering intelligence, surveillance and doing all of those things that we have to do to get some of these issues. With the resources we have been provided over the past little while we have been able to get the appropriate number of officers in place to start to tackle those issues,” he said.
Sergeant Chad Schesky from the MJPS’s Criminal Investigation Service gave a run down on the unit to Council at Tuesday afternoon’s special Council meeting - MJ Independent photo
Sergeant Chad Schesky said the Criminal Investigative Section (CIS) is attempting to focus on the growing issue of narcotics in the city.
“We are really trying to put our focus into the drug trafficking and trafficking related offences along with the weapons offences including illegal firearms,” he said.
He said the unit spreads constables in CIS to many areas and “they wear many hats.”
CIS liaises with Child Protection and Social Services and the unit “averages one investigation a week through them. Which is basically responding to the safety of children. And at times we have had three or four of these intakes within a week,” Schesky said.
“As you can imagine crimes against children, because they are at risk, those will take priority and that will divert our attention away from some of the other things that we have been working on.”
The addition of a full time constable in 2022 has lead CIS to several high profile busts he said including the trafficking of 22,000 illegal cigarettes, the seizure of firearms and the recent seizure of 850 grams of methamphetamine, other drugs, a handgun and over $6,000.
“Guns and drugs are now together and with that we have created a tier B team (to deal with it)”
He said the addition of the Tactical Team helps to ensure officers in CIS are safe for things like warrant executions.
Bourassa said that the guns and drugs being found is “not something brand new. It is something we are finding and able to address.”
“A lot of data you are hearing is we have the resources to tackle these challenges now. When we get into this in the past part of the challenges were not only did we lack some of the investigation resources, the tactical resources we needed because as Chad has said there very often is firearms in high risk situations.”
He went on to state the MJPS “needed the tactical capability and we built several years building that tactical capability…the two have to work hand in hand,” he said.
It needs to be noted that this is the first real admission guns have been in the hard core criminals’ arsenal for years and no public warning had been issued.
It also needs to be noted the MJPS did not raise the alarm regarding the prevalence of Meth and gangs in 2015 when they reappeared and waited until 2019 to make it public.
Bourassa pointed out that crime is not contained in one place but it is transient in nature.
“So much of that is not contained within a geographical area. Everything is spread out across regions and things and we work very closely with police departments across the province. And actually across the country and so we are asking for another officer from the province to focus more on this crimes with our other provincial partners,” he said.
Crime Rates
Bourassa discussed the crime rates in Moose Jaw.
“In 2021 when we talk about crime rates and that is each crime that is committed and reported in the community counts as one. And when we look at the data in 2021 we were a little bit higher than many of the municipalities in the province and lower than one other municipality - so we have crime like other places have,” he said.
Bourassa said the Moose Jaw crime rate has traditionally fluctuated up and down over the years.
The Statistics Canada weighted crime rate indexes - Crime Severity Index (CSI) and Violent Crime Severity Index (VCSI) - paint a different picture on local crime by attaching a weighted severity based upon the crime.
“What we have seen in our community is again fluctuations…Our crime severity index is driven by more property crimes than crimes against the person. So break-ins and those sort of things drive that however crimes against the person, we saw this over the last few years, as did every other jurisdiction we saw increases of those kinds of crimes reported to us. Much of it related to the restrictions of the pandemic.”
The calls from the public for service were up substantially in 2022.
“It has been consistently around the 16,000 range. In 2021 it was around there but what we have seen this year is we are up about 20 percent from today to where we were last year. We have had several thousand more calls for service this year than we have had in previous years,” Chief Bourassa said.
There is an increase in the number of tickets the MJPS has issued in 2022 but the majority of them are due to photo radar.
Bourassa said the photo radar at the intersection of 9th Avenue NW and the Trans Canada Highway is a bit of a paradox.
The paradox is the number of severe accidents resulting in death and serious injury has been substantially reduced but the number of tickets remain consistent year over year.
“Since the implementation of automatic speed enforcement….particularly on the highway we haven’t seen serious collisions or fatalities but what we have seen is he number of vehicles that are exceeding the speed limit…are staying the same.”
“So it is a bit of contradictory facts we are seeing. We don’t quite understand that. The speeds continue, and people continue to speed through those places, but we’re not seeing the serious collisions we have in the past,” he said.
Bourassa pointed out the anemic police officer per capita rate is now a thing of the past and the force is now on par with other police forces in the province thanks to Council and the Province approving new hirings.
“That is a thing of the past and it is enabling us to do some of the work we were unable to do in the past.”
MJPS Public Image
Chief Bourassa said the MJPS will be addressing an issue identified in the 2019 study conducted by the University of Regina.
The 2019 survey showed high levels of satisfaction in the MJPS work and the direction the MJPS was heading in but it also showed a major deficiency in the police’s ability to get their message out to residents.
“There was one area where we were given relative poor marks and that was in our public information area and providing information to the public and providing updates and providing crime prevention information,” Chief Bourassa said, adding the MJPS recognizes it as a problem and as such want to hire a full-time information officer.
“We are operating on a 30 year model where a police officer on a part-time basis on the corner of the desk handles all of that information and unfortunately in our world that kind of gets moved to the side,” he said.
“We have put forward a position for a public information position that would take that role on. And not only the service’s needs but the community’s expectations of us.”
It needs to be noted the MJPS works in a traditional symbiotic relationship with the local media where many police forces control access and information based upon the perceived “friendliness” of the news source. The model has widely been discredited in many books and journalism circles.
Ability To Be In Public Places
With the parity of the MJPS on a per capita officer basis the force has started to deploy officers to be in areas where the public is - parks, Downtown core and events.
“We heard what the public was saying. We heard what the businesses were saying Downtown and we hear what the Commission (Moose Jaw Board of Police Commissioners) was saying there was a greater need to have officer availability. The main reason was just surrounded public safety in general,” Superintendent Devon Oleniuk said, adding “so to satisfy that we did deploy officers on a fairly frequent basis this past summer. The results that we got…was fairly overwhelmingly satisfying. So we realize that is an issue we want to continue moving forward.”
Superintendent Devon Oleniuk addresses Council on Tuesday afternoon - MJ Independent photo
Oleniuk spoke about the partnership with the City where the Commissionaires have been patrolling the Downtown and other areas on a nightly basis.
After the program completes in about a week’s time what has been found by the patrols will be looked at to determine its usability and effectiveness.
“There are a number of factors to consider. The timeliness of it. The timeliness of it based upon such things at the weather and those kinds of things might skew the results. But nevertheless I think it is a very good program going and want to see results from that.”
After the results are analyzed a decision will be made on whether or not to continue the patrols on a regular basis.
Growing Force Needs More Space
With a growing force and a growing list of exhibits and other property they need to store the MJPS also said they needed more space for their operations.
Deputy Chief Rick Johns gave a brief report as to why the force needed the additional space.
Deputy Chief Rick Johns spoke about the MJPS needing additional space - MJ Independent photo
“At any given time we house over 3,000 exhibits of various sizes which unfortunately forces us to cut out space from our existing areas and re-designate that as storage. With the addition of a number of policing divisions…it has presented us with some further space restrictions,” Johns said.
As the force grows the MJPS is stretched in the area of lockers and changing areas for members.
“As a result we have been exploring a number of options to acquire additional space nearby,” he said.
The space requirements and the solutions found are included as part of the 2023 proposed MJPS budget.
With a unanimous vote Council decided to refer the budget to a future special Council Budget 2023 meeting to be voted on.