The W5 documentary that aired last Saturday on North Battleford crime, entitled “Crimetown,” was devastating in no shortage of ways.
In particular, it put a face to the victims of crime in North Battleford. There were interviews with the proprietors of Wally’s Food Basket, which is forever being robbed, as well as an individual who was stabbed and whose vehicle was stolen outside Blend restaurant.
The “WWE SmackDown” moment of the documentary came when RCMP Insp. John Sutherland said this to correspondent Avery Haines:
“In our downtown area here, there are eight people responsible for the 38 per cent of the calls for service that we get.”
Haines was flabbergasted. Why not arrest them, she asked.
Sutherland’s response:
“We’re not going to arrest our way out of this problem. Jail isn’t the answer. These people have social issues, they have mental health issues, and we need to support them.”
Cut to the victims of crime, who Haines says cannot believe what they are hearing. “Get them off the street,” he said.
The reaction of viewers across Canada: “OMG.”
With that, the credibility of North Battleford’s community safety strategy went straight to the waste management facility.
Here is the response from viewers on Facebook:
“… They say that 8 people contribute to over a third of the crime stats but won’t touch them … and you say Lethbridge cops suck and do nothing,” said one person from Lethbridge, Alta.
“8 known people responsible for 1/3 of this and police say they can’t do anything about it? really.”
“It is time, as a society, to demand accountability,” said another.
Now, in defence of Sutherland, I get what he was trying to say. In fact, I feel bad for him, because it looked like he was ambushed. He wasn’t advocating doing nothing. He was trying to make a point that arresting people isn’t going to work when the real problem is addictions and mental health issues, and the way to deal with those is totally different. He’s right, and to be fair, W5 did delve into that later on.
That said, it’s going to take civic officials a long time to live down this W5 story. The common-sense solution to addressing the problems in North Battleford is staring them in the face. “Get them off the street!”
Instead, the people in charge are enthusiastic about everything else, such as “crime prevention through environmental design,” or formalizing neighborhoods, or putting murals on the side of buildings, or staging block parties and handing out hot dogs to those attending.
Here’s what they should do. City officials ought to outline a vision that will directly address the weapons, gangs and drugs that are ravaging this community right now.
This is what is missing in Community Safety Co-ordinator Herb Sutton’s monthly reports to city council. I want to hear him go to the council podium and say this:
“Good evening, mayor and council. Tonight, I want to start with our priority initiatives to immediately get guns and knives, gangs and drugs and alcohol off our streets.”
Get it off the streets. If that was North Battleford’s strategy, alongside the rest of what they are doing now, we may get somewhere.
Back to these prolific offenders. It should come as no surprise that this small group has been an issue for years.
We were reporting on them back in 2015. In those days, city officials were speaking not of eight offenders, but of six offenders who caused 21 per cent of the crime in the downtown core over a period of two and a half years.
Here is what we reported when Sutton spoke to council about it in December 2015:
“Sutton informed councillors there was a good meeting last Friday that included law enforcement and mental health and addictions officials. Among the items discussed were those individuals and it turned out many of those around the table were familiar with them.
‘‘‘Honestly, I don’t know their identities yet, but those folks all seem to know who these individuals were,’ said Sutton.
“He added, ‘these are very complex situations, there are no easy answers and I think it stands to reason if there were easy answers we’d be seeing successes already.’”
Sutton spoke again about it in April of 2016:
“The individuals were identified and ‘we’ve agreed that in spite of all the efforts of enforcement folks, it wasn’t effective in changing the pattern of their existence,’ said Sutton.
“‘For that, agencies were then brought together to try to deal with their situation, but ‘we haven’t had any significant changes, to be honest with you,’ Sutton admitted. ‘These individuals are still causing issues in the downtown area.’”
He spoke of that as an example of why systemic changes and different approaches needed to be considered.
“My fear is that if we don’t think deeply about systemic changes, we will very quickly revert back to using enforcement, because we have no other choice,” said Sutton.”
All right. If enforcement is not the answer, other solutions ought to be used, or put in place and funded if they are not there already. Addiction treatment, homeless shelters, programming, you name it. For mental health issues, we have a forensic psychiatric hospital right here; no other city in the province has that.
Regardless of whether the response to these prolific offenders is to get them to a rehab or detox facility, or to a psychiatric hospital, or wherever else they need to go, you can’t simply allow them to go back to creating problems with their criminal activity. You still need to keep them off the street, at least until they stop their antisocial behavior.
Here’s what is most troubling. It’s been two and a half years, yet here we are in 2018 still talking about a small group of offenders in the downtown.
There’s been enough time to come up with a way forward, even systemic changes, to address the issues these few have created.
If North Battleford’s safety strategy cannot deal with eight prolific offenders, how can anyone expect it to be effective in dealing with all the rest of the criminals who have made this community the No. 1 “Crimetown” of Canada?
That’s the question people ought to be asking.
