By Aaron Stuckel

More people, more challenges: Policing minister

Sep 26, 2013 | 4:52 PM

At a municipal policing forum held in Regina Thursday, Corrections and Policing minister Christine Tell gave a speech about the challenges the RCMP and city police forces face as the province’s population reaches an all-time high.

The forum was put on by the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association which had Tell as the keynote speaker.

In her speech, Tell spoke about the rising demand and rising costs of policing in the province and how those issues might be dealt with.

“We recognize that if we continue doing business the way we’re doing it, we’re going to continue having problems,” she said in an interview after her speech.

One of those problems, Tell said, is that “very little” time is spent catching actual criminals. Too much of what both municipal police and RCMP do is spent on people who might have mental health or addiction issues. But they are looking at ways to get past that.

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Tell spoke of a community mobilization initiative that has been implemented in many communities across the province. The program was initiated in Prince Albert where, according to Tell, the community has seen a 30 per cent drop in overall crime. It involves representatives from different government ministries, including social services and health, getting around a table and dealing with deviants on a case-by-case basis. Instead of simply throwing them in jail, the program hopes to get them rehabilitated before they become recurring offenders.

“Before a person at risk gets in front of the police and into the justice system, we want to catch them beforehand,” she said. “We are hopeful we will see reductions in the numbers of people that are… accessing our health care system, accessing our social services system, ending up in jail; the whole thing.”

Another change Tell spoke of is moving to what she called a “low-risk community safety model,” which would free up professional police officers by getting other people to attend low-risk calls. She also said more people need to understand the dangers of drunk and distracted driving, quoting a statistic that 16 people per 100,000 in Saskatchewan die on the province’s roads every year.

The forum was put on by the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association.

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