By Taylor MacPherson

Police Commissioners talk statistics, preview carbine rifles

Jan 23, 2017 | 11:00 AM

Prince Albert’s Board of Police Commissioners discussed the absence of recent policing statistics and previewed the department’s new hardware at this morning’s meeting.

Police Chief Troy Cooper said the police service was unable to report policing statistics in recent months due to IT staff turnover. The turnover, Cooper said, left remaining members unable to use the old data collection and reporting systems.

No statistics have been published since October.

“Our data collection is fairly complex, and so it requires someone with an intimate knowledge of the system and of the different laws that we enforce,” Cooper told paNOW outside the meeting.

Cooper said the police service is currently designing a brand new system in order to provide more data to the public in a more useful way.

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“We’re hoping to go to more of a city map where people can look at their neighbourhood and their area and see what’s been going on,” Cooper said. “If you look at other cities like Saskatoon they do have a sort of hotspot map. We’re hopeful to get even more advanced than that.”

The new system, Cooper said, may not be up and running until 2018.

“We’re hopeful at least by the end of the year to have identified the programs, the software and the budget required,” he said.

Despite the lack of stats, the board received a report on recent bylaw activity which shows vehicle seizures are becoming much more common in the city.

Bylaw officers seized 31 vehicles last month, more than twice the number seized in December of 2015. A total of 245 vehicles were seized in 2016, an increase of 55 per cent over last year.

Cooper said vehicles can be seized for a number of reasons including improper parking or blocking a snow clearing route, but added unpaid fines are the main reason for the growing seizure rates.

“You’ll see, over the course of the next year, more of a focus on the collection of unpaid fines,” Cooper said. “We have over a million dollars in unpaid parking fines in the city.”

Cooper brought one of the department’s new carbines with him to the meeting to show the commissioners during their in-camera session after the public agenda.

“We have the authority for our officers now to carry carbines as one of our tools,” Cooper said. “Internally, we’re working on policy and of course purchasing the equipment.”

Cooper said the public will have opportunities to learn more about the short-barrelled assault rifles in coming months.

“We’ll have a media strategy developed so that the whole community can see them and understand them as we roll them out,” he said.

Taylor MacPherson is paNOW’s court reporter and weekend editor. He can be reached at Taylor.MacPherson@jpbg.ca or tweet him @tmacphersonnews.