A town hall meeting was held last night (March 15) to address the issue of crime in rural areas.

Airdrie MLA Angella Pitt, MP Blake Richards and the Airdrie RCMP partnered to organize a town hall meeting to address the frustrations of hundreds of rural residents who have become victims of crime.

The town hall included presentations from the RCMP, Crime Stoppers, Citizens On Patrol and Rural Crime Watch.  When the rural property owners in the room were asked who had been victimized by rural crime a third of the room stuck up their hands echoing the seriousness of the issue. 

One recurring problem when dealing with rural crime is underfunding and lack of members; rural RCMP are funded 100% by the Provincial Government. However, the RCMP has created three priorities to tackle rural crime throughout the area. 

The first priority includes implementing a crime reduction unit, this unit will be a group of specialized RCMP members with past success in arresting criminals.  The Unit will also include an analyst to help gather information on suspects making it easier for the members to identify suspects. To put this into perspective, rural Airdrie has two members on patrol at any given time, this increase will include an additional eight members. 

The second priority is creating an intelligence program that will use analysts to go into databases and find out information from each department providing better information for RCMP members.   

The third priority is call management which will implement the changes so that RCMP members on the road will attend priority one and two calls solely, leaving priority three and four calls for other members. 

Even with these attempts at a solution being discussed the frustrations of the room were high with many rural residents asking why these criminals are only getting six months to a year in jail and calling this punishment a "consequence of business". 

While the rural crime watch and citizens on patrol groups urged residents to join their cause and be "part of the solution", many of the residents had suggestions of their own such as authorizing certain rural members to respond to ongoing crime instead of an RCMP member coming in from a surrounding town.  That motion is similar to a volunteer sheriff program that once existed.

This town hall meeting comes days after Airdrie MLA and Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs proposed Federal Motion-167 to tackle the rural crime problem. 

READ MORE:

Pitt and UCP support a federal motion on tackling rural crime 

 

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