Downtown foot patrol continuing into 2020

Inspector Brent Secondiak says overall it’s been a success, but some changes need to be made, such as how and when officers are deployed.

He says deploying officers from the Priority Street Crimes Unit created a gap in services, so the kind of officers and the hours they’re deployed will likely change.

“It will probably be different hours, we found this year that the greatest need was kind of day time hours, early into the evening,” he says. “There was no point working late at night because there was really no calls and no people down there.”

He adds having patrols in downtown may have pushed crime to other areas of the city, so they’ll work on making changes to address that issue.

“We also noticed there was an increase in property crimes in surrounding areas so it likely displaced some of the downtown crimes to areas on the southeast hill for example,” he says. “So we’re going to look at ensure that that doesn’t happen elsewhere in the city because of displacement of crime in the downtown core.”

Secondiak is currently creating a report on the findings of the initiatives first year. It’s likely to be released in the next month.

The downtown patrols are still out on the streets, but will wrap up soon.

“It will be done in the next few weeks here, so typically the winter months are quieter for different types of crime, not as much transient crime. It tends to be more confined to residences or businesses in the winter months.”

by Jessie Weisner

Downtown foot patrol continuing into 2020

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