Alberta Justice Minister Doug Schweitzer says while Airdronians may be unique, their concerns about rural crime are the same as all other Albertans he's spoken with.  

And Schweitzer has spoken with a lot during his Rural CrimeTown Hall tour that stopped at the Agriculture Centre in Airdrie this morning.  Schweitzer explained what the government is trying to accomplish with the tour.  "Rural crime is a huge issue in every community we're visiting across Alberta.  We want to make sure that we let communities know that we're dedicated to implementing our campaign commitments to Albertans, from hiring 50 new prosecutors to providing additional funding to ALERT, the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team, to going after organized crime and to also make sure that we deal with the addictions issue we have across Alberta."

The Rural Crime tour also comes as the government is preparing its first budget to be delivered in October and, according to Schweitzer, they want to be sure that the budget reflects the priorities of rural Albertans.  "We want to go out and talk to as many rural communities as we can right now to make sure that our priorities reflect their reality.  The feedback we've been receiving has actually given us an immense amount of new ideas that we can go back to our department with and make sure we have the right priorities at heart."

Schweitzer says the feedback that he's received so far from Albertans has been consistent across the board.  "People feel that there aren't enough police officers on the ground, they're frustrated about the justice system being a revolving door so we want to talk to them about our strategies on all fronts."

The opposition NDP has recently claimed that, in an effort to cut down on government spending, the UCP is planning on implementing a new funding model that will make smaller municipalities, those under 5,000 in population, pay for some, or all, of their policing costs.  Schweitzer says no decision has been made about that.

"We haven't decided one way or another if we're going to implement a new police costing model but we've heard from communities that they want additional police resources, in addition to what we committed to in the campaign, so right now we're talking to communities to see if there's an appetite to implement that."

The budget, once it's released in October, is expected to have cutbacks in several areas but Schweitzer says when it comes to assertions that the budget for poice costs will also be cut that nothing could be further from the truth.  "We're going to be investing more money into police, not less.  We're going to make sure that Albertans that elected us on our campaign platform to tackle rural crime and to implement our platform around that issue, we are dedicated to getting that done."

The Justice Minister's Rural Crime Watch tour began on September 5th in Bragg Creek and is scheduled to wrap up September 30th with a stop in Medicine Hat.  Schweitzer said today that more stops might be added because of the demand from Albertans.  

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