Council’s committee of the whole got their first RCMP report at their March 7 meeting, hearing from Thompson detachment officer-in-charge Staff Sgt. Jenny Melanson and Supt. Ryan Mitchell, who recently took over as north district commander.
The report is the first to a council committee since October and covered the last two months of 2021 as well as January of this year.
For 2021 as a whole, theft, public disorder, drug offences, mischief, robberies and provincial and Criminal Code traffic offences were all down, while assaults, sexual assaults, domestic assaults and break-and-enters were all up from the previous year, particularly the number of assaults, 1,657 in 2021, higher than in two of the previous three years, with 2019 being the exception.
Melanson said not all of the differences may be the result of the actual number of incidents changing. Some may be scored differently by junior officers with less time on the job than they would be by more experienced officers, while traffic incident changes can be largely explained by the fact that the detachment’s dedicated traffic services officer had to perform other duties to cover for absences resulting from vacations and other factors.
Coun. Les Ellsworth asked whether crimes can be pinpointed to particular areas to illustrate where problems are most prevalent, pointing to the area around Walmart, the liquor store and the homeless shelters as one he feels is the site of many offences. He also said the public safety situation in the last few years is worse than he’s ever seen it during his 43 years living in Thompson.
“And it don’t seem to be getting any better,” he said. “We collectively have got to do something differently. Because what we’re doing for the last three or four years is not working."
For Coun. Duncan Wong, the big question is if there’s more proactive ways for RCMP to protect public safety, since policing costs account for more than 20 per cent of Thompson’s annual budget.
“I am a businessman,” Wong said. “If I spend money, I want to see the result. If I keep spending money, I don’t see a result, that’s a problem.”
Melanson was asked if tracking alcohol involvement with various categories of crime is possible, arguing that it would give the city more information to use when it goes seeking help to offset the negative social effects of liquor sales.
“It’s not all just public, disorderly, drunk conduct,” he said. “There is a another bigger and very serious side to that as well.”
Presenting that information in a way that doesn’t appear to be victim-blaming is something to consider, said the staff sergeant.
“There is a risk to providing the alcohol-involved stats,” she said. "We certainly don’t want to present it in a way that would be inappropriate for the victims.”
Mitchell said that he’d been posted in many places but that Thompson is a unique community and the many challenges it presents means he wants to focus on the essentials to ensure that resources are deployed effectively.
“What I’m really trying to do since I’ve been here … is get us out of a lot of non-core police business,” he said. “We are all about meeting the client needs and you are our clients.”
