Mayor Borrows Crime Reduction Outline
Wednesday, January 23, 2013 @ 4:00 AM
Prince George, B.C.- The Mayor of Prince George has launched her Task Force on Crime, and it would seem she has more than “borrowed” a page from the Surrey Crime Reduction Strategy which was implemented in 2006.
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Mayor Green’s 4 Point Plan
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Surrey’s 4 Strand Plan (implemented 2006)
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Reduce crime and increase community safety
involved in crime reduction
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Reduce crime and increase community safety
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Increase public involvement in reducing crime
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Get more members of the public involved in reducing crime
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Increase integration between all stakeholders
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Boost integration between all stakeholders involved in crime reduction
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Improve public awareness around the reality and perception of crime
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Make more people aware of the reality and perception of crime
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Mayor Green’s Objectives:
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Surrey’s 4 strand objectives:
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Prevent and deter targeted priority crimes;
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Prevent and Deter Crime.
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Detect crime and apprehend/prosecute offenders;
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Apprehend and Prosecute Offenders.
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Rehabilitate and integrate offenders as productive members of society and;
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Rehabilitate and Reintegrate Offenders.
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Address the fear of crime and promote feelings of safety.
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Reality and Perceptions of Crime.
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Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts says Mayor Green and RCMP Superintendent Stubbs visited Surrey in early December “They came down to look at our Crime Reduction Strategy, wanted to know what worked and what didn’t work, what we had been through in terms of understanding some of the initiatives , just gathering information.”
The Surrey Crime Reduction Strategy focused on the following crimes:
- Nuisance behaviour ( loitering, graffiti tagging, panhandling etc.)
- Violent crime including homicide and robbery
- Domestic violence
- Sexual exploitation of youth
- Redisential break and enter
- Business break and enter and retail theft
- Vehicle crime
- drugs and alcool related crime
- crime and public transport.
One of the recommendations in Surrey was to ensure there was one police officer for every 700 people in the city of 500,000. Mayor Watts says that has been achieved, and there have been enhancements. Community Safety Officers, people who wear high visibility safety vests, as a visual reference to the number of “officers” on the street who can carry out some duties which can free up police to do other things.
By following Surrey’s lead and not “reinventing the wheel” Mayor Green is saving some dollars in the research portion of what a Crime Reduction Task Force can accomplish. Surrey’s Mayor, Dianne Watts, says their research was intensive “I think in terms of money spent in doing the research, we looked at best practices from around the world, we went to the U.K.. we looked at some of their models, so those were initial costs up front that we covered off.”
But the Crime Reduction Strategy has ongoing costs says Mayor Watts “We have a Crime Reduction Strategy Manager and a couple of staff members, so maybe it’s $300 thousand a year”.
In addition to the three people in the Crime Reduction Strategy office, Surrey also has 7 crime analysts. Prince George had one, but that post ( at the RCMP detachment) has been vacant for about a year and a half. The good news is it is expected the vacancy will be filled soon.
Prince George has already adopted some of the plans developed by Surrey, for instance the program to reduce the number of grow ops by bringing in building code standards and fire regulations as a means of not allowing a building to be occupied until the upgrades have been completed. Then there is the electrical box wrap program which has been supported by Prince George Community grant programs and has electrical boxes wrapped in vinyl images. That wrap program has resulted in a reduction in graffiti.
According to Surrey’s 2011 report on the achievements of the Crime Reduction Strategy, it is noted there has been an 81.6% drop in the number of confirmed grow ops over the number known in 2007.
There have been fewer reports of graffiti as the City has adopted a zero tolerance for graffiti bylaw which requires property owners to take immediate steps to remove graffiti.
Surrey City workers are trained by police and fire officials to keep their eyes open and watch for signs of crime, it’s a program called “City Watch”.
Surrey’s Community Safety Officers “focused largely on community liaison and crime prevention initiatives” says the Surrey report. In Prince George, staff cuts a year ago resulted in the closure of the Community Policing office in the Hart.
Surrey noted an increase in the number of businesses taking part in the Meth Watch program, keeping tabs on folks who buy materials used in meth labs. There are now 205 businesses in Surrey taking part in that program.
Some of the programs being operated in Surrey may not produce any results for years, as they are programs to support children in their early years and through mentoring programs as they grow. Mayor Watts says one third of Surrey’s population is under the age of 19. “There are definitely some strategies we had to have in place including some wrap around services for young kids.”
Mayor Watts says one thing is certain, the old ways of handling crime don’t work anymore . She says too often police are expected to act as social workers but there are agencies that can take on those social responsibilities and let police focus their efforts where they need to be focused.
Comments
Do I have this straight? Diane Watts goes to Surrey, Eng. and comes home to Surrey, BC, with a plan? Right.
It also appears that in large part so far, the Surrey plan emphasizes correction after the fact: can’t occupy a house after a grow-op till the repairs are done – this reduces grow-ops how exactly? “Known grow-ops” are down, but does anyone know if the amount of dope on the street is down? Maybe the grow-ops moved to Aldergrove or Chilliwak and just kept on producing.
If the Green Slime at city hall doesn’t have something a wee tad more concrete and specific to our city, it will all be very costly window dressing.
Nuisance behaviour ( loitering, graffiti tagging, panhandling etc.)
This brings back a memory of the first time I was on probation.I was 15 and another young offender and myself invented one of the first door to door scams….and we pulled it off while doing community service,needless to say we both learned our lessons and got out of the life of crime…
Fewer reports of graffiti in Surrey since building owners have to immediately remove the graffiti.
Just exactly how does forcing the building manager to remove graffiti have any effect on the number of individuals doing graffiti?
Want some pride in the city, cut the grass, clean up the curbs, sweep the streets, remove the weeds along the road side, as a starting point.
If it looks like a ghetto, it probably is a ghetto.
I am with you on that Resident. The incident of graffiti is still important. The longevity of visibility is as well ….
It may be that as a result of removing graffiti quickly, there are fewer incidents of graffiti in the first place.
On the other hand, without knowing some more details, it may actually increase so as to become a real nuisance and greater expense, and not at the public cost, but as private cost if on private property.
Perhaps such a direction will also move graffiti over to public spaces ….
Here is a great crime reduction.. let the cops do their jobs.. have the judge hand out real sentences…and no time off sentence for good behaviour… instead add time for bad behaviour…
STOP PANDERING TO THE CRIMINALS
“One of the recommendations in Surrey was to ensure there was one police officer for every 700 people in the city of 500,000”
And this is good for what reason?
The rate used for most statistics in the world is officers per 100,000 population.
Having 1 officer per 700 on that basis is a rate of 143/100,000.
So, we that information in hand we can now get some other input.
2009 data â Halifax has 230/100,000; Toronto 212; Edmonton 183; Calgary 159.
From this 2009 article http://calgary.ctvnews.ca/calgary-has-fewer-police-per-capita-1.464840
âWe are pleased the city committed to 200 positions over three years, we are pleased the PROVINCE HAS STEPPED UP with additional resourcesâ
Another interesting comment about the reduced crime rate â¦. âKing (a criminologist) says aging population, not more officers on the streets, is responsible for a decline in Calgary’s crime rate. “It’s the percentage of young males 16 to 24 who commit the most amount of crime. If we have fewer of those people in a community, city, or country, the crime rate is going to drop.”
copied or not is no big deal. In fact why reinvent the wheel.
The better question is how much more is this going to cost?
In the end dispute all the political spin coming from some on council, our taxes still go up. 4% last year and I bet it’ll be another 2 or 3% this year.
BTW, is there a correlation between the number of officers per 100,000 in cities from east to west decreasing while the crime rate from east to west increases??
Then factor in the probably older population in the east, to a probably younger population in teh West, and cerainly a younger population in the North …. we have one more factor.
BC is the pot province of Canada.. why not run with it… make it legal.. tax it and put all the money into our medical and education system. Makes way to much sense for it to work.
As far as PG goes … the rate of police per 100,000 is not easy to find.
The best I can quickly find is that in 2005 the City had 121 officers for a census population of about 72,000 which makes it a rate of 166/100,000.
Almost fell outta my chair…P Val…sign the Sensible BC petition and tell 2 friends about it..We could and should be a have Prov.
The amount of taxes are 5x what the oil/gas bring..I would like to pay my fair share too..O’Cannabis…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/policing
Good olde CBC provides some recent data.
Looks like City of Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax have over 200/100,000 population.
Three of them are “traditional port cities with ready access to ocean going vessels. Such port cities were/are traditionally crime-ridden the world over.
Surrey still appears as having a low number of police per 100,000
So looking at the pay across the country, why is it that Quebec has been able to maintain the increase in salary at or below inflation, while the rest of the country has increased by considerably more than the rate of inflation?
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Surrey, with 134 police per 100,000 has a cirme severity index of 130.9 while Richmond with 116 police/100,000 has a crime severity index of 83.3 ….
In the meanime, Sherbrooke has 129 officers per 100,000 with a criome severity index of 69.4 ….. and they are living in a province with the lowest pay rate for the police and lowest increase in pay by a long shot between 1997 and 2010.
So, somebody please tell me what police pay, number of police per 100,000 have to do with crime severity index?
Please, let us not react to this like Russia has. Let us find the real cause of crime in our city, our province and Canada and work on that.
BTW, why are we working with Surrey, when we obviously need to work with Richmond which has the lowest crime severity index of the three GVRD cities shown? We want to know why they are successful when Surrey is a failure. We do not need to work with communities that are failing. We need to work with winners.
Here is another reason we do not really need to work with Surrey. The data below is for the crime serverity index change from 2010 to 2011
richmond 83.377.3-7.20%
burnaby99.893.3-6.51%
surrey130.9129.9-0.76%
Richmond is again the obvious choice …. I realize it is only a one year data window
I suspect we have a low hanging fruit scenario here rather than 10 minutes of research …. the mayor of Surrey happened to be handy to our Mayor ……
Which raises the question, what type of work is the Mayor’s assistant able to do?
Virtually every single day when you turn on a Vancouver news station you hear of crime in greater Vancouver, and virtually every day the crime is occurring in Surrey. And we want to follow their example?
Gus. Seems to me that we now have 124 Police officers on payroll. The contract calls for 128. There were three officers transferred to general duty from the Community Policing Program a number of years ago, and civilians were hired to Community Policing. This brought the numbers up for both the police and the city.
Thanks Palopu …..
I doubt a bunch of political types talking around the table are not going to do a thing to impact the picture.
The more knowledgeable people will be gathered around the table, the more complex the whole issue will become.
In the end interesting converstion will be had for some, but I think the time is better spent working on something that is in complete control of the City, such as infrastucture, maintenance, standards, services such as fire servfices, financing, taxes, etc.
All those need a close look, something I thought might come from the Core services review, but obviously did not …… all going back to my first question ….. can we please know the credentials/experience of the people doing the work ….. they obviosuly were not qualified, or maybe City staff were not able to provide them with the info they needed. That possibility now exists in my mind based on the reluctance to provide such information to a Councillor.
sorry …. a missplaced “not” at the beginning of the above note. :-(
So much for free speech. A censored comment because it quesioned greens possibility of nepotism? What a shock.
Your comment âOne thing is for sureâ, is an accusation. If you can âprove âyour comments we will carry them. Free speech does not entitle you to say what you want, when you want. That is why we have libel laws in Canada.
Free speech does not operate only at the whim of what you think is your entitlement. .
“an allegation that a person is guilty of some fault, offence, or crime; imputation”
Gossip, rumour mongering, basically telling a lie can get you sued fast.
And rumours, gossip and innuendo have hurt good people, something workplaces are rampant with. They’re disgusting, despicable statements.
You know, I get frustrated with government at every level. Organized crime has billions of dollars to spend on lawyers and safeguards against law. Then you have local provincial and federal governments throwing peanuts to police and then complaining police are not doing their job. I’d love to see a politician of any stripe finally stand up and say, “We’re hiring 20 new positions to combat crime in our town” but you won’t see it happening any time soon. They have absolutely no clue what it takes to finally put the hammer down and sweep a town clean of crap. But that’s what we need here, and just maybe we’d have Macleans lose interest in us. We needed the space in the new police office 20 years ago and we’re finally getting it, just wish the fool politicians would’ve had the balls to deal with it then. And all of you who whine about the cost can quit calling them when you have a problem.
Some what like the A-h I got next door too me……Ahhhh sue,sue,you betcha…Eh! gooheads..
“copied or not is no big deal. In fact why reinvent the wheel”
I think it’s a HUGE deal. Given the complexities of crime, I would think that a crime reduction strategy should be tailored to the specific area in order to account for the unique demographics and trends within the local population.
Copying a strategy from somewhere else without doing the research to understand what is needed in your local environment could wind up being a complete disaster from both a resource allocation and effectiveness point of view. In fact, it could be argued that implementing a strategy not tailored to your specific environment could make the problem worse. Is this not common sense?
“We needed the space in the new police office 20 years ago and we’re finally getting it, just wish the fool politicians would’ve had the balls to deal with it then. And all of you who whine about the cost can quit calling them when you have a problem.”
I think we are understaffed where members are concerned and feel they do a good job – in my experience.
However! I need a new car to get to work…do I buy a midsize car, good on mileage that is a manageable cost that will meet my needs OR do I just go fer it and buy a vehicle for 100 grand.
Sure, now I can’t afford to service the new vehicle for 100 grand as well as it needs and now don’t have any money left over to fix that crack in the basement of the house that shelters my entire family, replace the old windows in the back of the house resulting in higher heating costs, Timmy doesn’t get new glasses and we have to shut the phone off BUT, I will look AMAZING driving the big shiny vehicle ’round town.
Do this ten more times with different items, same scenario. Broke in no time, the family is fighting over table scraps and now I can add alimony and child support to my monthly expenses.
We should all manage our personal finances like the City manages our tax dollars.
A good start would be by closing all the low cost highly efficient CPAC Offices. There must be a much more expensive option. Green will find it!!
Dillusions of adequacy continue to rein.
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