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La Loche rejects crime-prevention strategy

Feb 9, 2016 | 3:51 PM

Several months before the shooting tragedy on Jan. 22, La Loche town leaders decided to reject a popular crime-prevention model designed in Prince Albert. But town officials insist they didn’t reject a crime-prevention strategy all together.

La Loche already has organizations in place that help with crime-prevention, and wanted a North Saskatchewan specific program, La Loche Friendship Centre executive director Leonard Montgrand said.

“We’re such a small community,” he said. “We have inter-agency meetings every month. Just about every organization in town comes together. We have a lot of programs out there in the community in terms of strengthening families using intervention and so forth.”

The model they rejected is referred to as the HUB. It’s designed to reduce demands on the justice system by taking out cases that can be dealt with by other agencies.

Montgrand said HUB is fine for larger cities, but doesn’t work as well for small North Saskatchewan communities.

“We just don’t have the ability to tap into that,” he said. “It’s just too big. It takes a lot of preparations. We’re not ready for it at all.”

He said he proposed the province test the HUB model in just one city instead of applying it to all communities to create a workable template for the system.

“You have to figure out the kinks. If they were to take a community and create the HUB there and come back and say ‘look, it took us 120 man hours to put this hub together…it looks good,’ then we can buy into it, but at this time we’re not even there.”

“The whole community has to buy into it, all the community-based organizations and all the government agencies. If there’s a link missing in the whole system, it’s not going to work.”

La Loche won’t be going ahead with the HUB model but they are constructing a new friendship centre to strengthen community ties.

“We give people the opportunity and ability to come forward if they need to do any counselling or any type of intervention and we can refer them to the appropriate department within our communities,” Montgrand said.

The friendship centre is nearly 60 per cent done and is expected to open in April. Montgrand said they took out a mortgage on the building and have fundraised its construction.

“We’ve done it ourselves because it’s something we need greatly in our community. We put on huge programming for the community, which at times is never enough.”

HUB program creator Dale McFee, a former Prince Albert police chief and current deputy minister with the office of corrections and policing, said his wife had the perfect analogy for what his program does.

“She was a school teacher and she could predict folks who were headed to the criminal justice system, yet we wait for it to happen and we try to fix them once that’s happened.”

He said the HUB system is designed to “de-clutter” the justice system.

McFee added there was no way to know if a crime-prevention model in La Loche would have prevented the school shooting.

“As the days and weeks unfold I think it’s important we focus on the solutions,” he said. “We need not jump into things without continuing to focus on the long-term success, not just for La Loche but for the northern communities of Saskatchewan.”

ssterritt@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @spencer_sterrit