Alberta should consider having its own police force in order to help protect its countryside from rural crime, a Conservative Party report suggests.
Federal Conservative Party MPs released a report earlier this month at a symposium in Red Deer on rural crime in Alberta.
The report was compiled by 12 Alberta Conservative MPs, including Dane Lloyd of Sturgeon River-Parkland, who teamed up with United Conservative Party MLAs in 2017 to hold a series of town halls on rural crime.
“All of our offices are hearing about this issue,” Lloyd said, so Alberta’s rural MPs decided to talk to residents about it and compile their suggestions.
Citing an “unprecedented” increase in rural crime in Canada over the last two years, the report says rural residents are “fearful, frustrated, and angry” by long response times on the part of the RCMP.
Alberta’s crime severity index has been on the rise since roughly 2014 and is now back up to 2008 levels, Statistics Canada reports. Alberta’s rural areas saw about 38 per cent more crime last year than urban ones did.
Lloyd said Sturgeon County residents told him they had seen a spike in property crime – a sentiment backed by local crime stats – and that rural properties were being targeted by repeat offenders.
“It’s very co-ordinated. It’s not just random crimes of opportunity.”
The report recommends that the federal government review rural policing models and consider replacing the current RCMP contract police model with regional policing, a dedicated rural crime task force or “a fully empowered Provincial Police Service.”
Alberta ran its own police force from 1917 to 1932 when the federal government cancelled all its police contracts, historians note.
Lloyd said residents felt such a force would let Alberta put more cops into rural areas, adding he personally didn’t feel such a force was necessary. The RCMP should work more closely with rural governments and First Nations on crime prevention, and were in fact doing so.
The report called for the legal concept of “reasonable” use of force in defence of person or property to be changed to consider timeliness of police response and other common law practices.
“I don’t want to see people engaging in gun battles in our rural areas,” Lloyd said, but he also didn’t want to see farmers raked over the coals for defending themselves, as was the case with Alberta farmer Edouard Maurice, who was put on trial earlier this year after he allegedly shot at suspected thieves only to have all charges against him dropped.
Lloyd said he wanted the law changed so that going after vulnerable rural populations would be an aggravating factor in sentencing.
Lloyd said he supported the report’s call for tax credits and new funding for crime-prevention measures and groups such as Sturgeon Rural Crime Watch. Those groups do excellent work, but need help to attract new, young members.
This report would be submitted to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security as part of an ongoing investigation into rural crime, Lloyd said. He suspected the political pressure created by this report was behind a recent move by the RCMP to put more resources towards rural crime reduction, resulting in some big arms busts and the arrest of many repeat offenders. The province had also beefed up its financial support for rural police and appointed more judges to address a backlogged legal system – many crimes are committed by offenders out on bail, he noted.
While this report had a lot of good ideas, Bonny Swart-Attwood of Sturgeon Rural Crime Watch said she wanted to see the government actually follow through with some of them. Residents also needed to up their game when it comes to crime prevention by working together and investing in security systems.
“It’s not like it was in 1983,” she said.
“The criminals are getting more aggressive.”
The Toward a Safer Alberta report can be found at bit.ly/2FyiIwR.
