The Lloydminster RCMP General Investigation Section (GIS) has seen success in crime reduction in the community.
Staff Sgt. Jerry Nutbrown, who heads the GIS, provided an update to Lloydminster City Council at the July 14 Governance and Priorities Committee meeting.
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The GIS unit is currently comprised of 11 regular members and one municipal employee.
“I’ve got an investigative side and a crime reduction side in my unit,” said Nutbrown. “On the crime reduction side, we’re focusing on high-risk repeat offenders. With our unit, we can quickly react to different things that might pop up. We can put some resources straight to it.”
Nutbrown also outlined recent investigations his unit has been tackling.
“The last couple of weeks, the unit was involved in a couple of CDSA (Controlled Substance or Drug Act) investigations,” he said. “We did search warrants on houses, which ended up with positive results.”
The investigations, according to Nutbrown, started with support from the public.
“Both of these investigations were started with tips, complaints from the public,” he said, explaining residents are stepping forward and submitting information on things they’re seeing in the community.
“The two residents we had done the recent search warrants on weren’t on our radar at all until the public came forward and said, ‘You may want to check this place out.’
“We’re getting more support and more assistance from the general public.”
Proactive work in the community led to a meat thief being apprehended and serving time.
“One of our crew folks had located this fellow with some meat he had on his possession,” said Nutbrown. “(We) determined it was stolen from one of the local grocery stores, which weren’t aware of the theft, and we ended up going through that, working the file.
“That male had also been responsible for thefts in Kitscoty, Maidstone and other ones in the city here. Went through the court system, he ended up actually getting 60 days in custody because of his record and things like that.”
As part of its proactive work, the RCMP have implemented a bait bike program.
“We ended up doing a bait bike deployment,” explained Nutbrown. “We wire it up with a GPS tracker and put it out in the community because that had been identified last summer as a significant issue amongst the community. We’ve had quite good success in the people taking our bike.”
Nutbrown said the success of the bait bike program has caused criminals to go to greater lengths to steal now that they’re aware the police are out in the community.
“We’ll change our tactics a little bit and continue on with it,” he said. “Hopefully, to the point that anybody that sees a bike sitting anywhere is going to be too nervous to want to take it.”
The GIS’ policing work also extends to those currently in police custody and high-risk offenders.
“We’ll monitor incarcerated individuals as well. That’s a little bit newer,” he said.
“We’ll find out when we’re getting a high-risk offender that’s being released, I’ll have a couple folks in my unit find the individual and have a chat with them (letting them know) we’re aware. It’s sort of habitual offender management action we can take.”
Nutbrown also spoke to the recent work of a motorcycle unit out of Saskatchewan and how it affected local calls.
“An interesting thing with that is our call volume goes up because they’re generating files,” he said. “However, my unit, we’ve been tracking some of the statistics when it comes related to the unhoused. That’s been a significant issue from last summer in the community.
“When those motorcycles were in town doing their thing, our calls for service related to the unhoused dropped to almost nil.”
He said, some days, calls related to the unhoused can be up to 33 per cent of the the detachment’s total calls, or higher.
Deputy Mayor Jason Whiting says the public can see the results of the work RCMP put in.
“I do think we’re seeing the RCMP do a lot of hard work and we’re seeing that result in some of the media results they put out,” said Whiting. “They’re making some wins in a lot of different areas.”
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