Crime Reduction Unit for Castlegar
By Kyra Hoggan
A new commanding officer is just part of the shake-up going on at the Castlegar RCMP detachment, as a long-awaited local policing initiative finally gets off the ground.
Now that Sgt. Laurel Mathew is at the helm of the department, and a new corporal on the way to join the team at the end of the month, Cpl. Mike Mysko will soon be free to turn his attention to the Crime Reduction Unit the city has had in the works for years now.
“It’ll be myself and one other member from this detachment, who hasn’t yet been chosen,” Mysko said. “There’s been a lot of interest in the position, and we have to have the individuals apply and go through due process.”
The municipally-funded department was created, he said, to focus on prolific and on-going crime within the city: everything from property crimes to drugs to probation violations. Mysko will oversee the unit, as he and one other plainclothes RCMP member are freed from the usual call responses to follow up ongoing problem spots in the city.
“We’ll be working hand-in-hand with the crime reduction team in Trail,” he added, explaining criminals often lack the courtesy to confine their work to a specific city’s boundaries. “The individuals committing property crimes, for example, are often not from here.”
Mysko said there’ll be plenty of work to keep two full-time police officers busy, and councillor Russ Hearne, deputy chair of the city’s Public Safety committee, concurs.
“We (budgeted for the extra unit) a couple of years ago, partly in response to problems we were having with a local drug house (better known to locals as the ‘crack shack’),” he said. “We decided the money – roughly $100,000 per member – was a worthwhile investment to keep these sorts of problems in check.”
He said more recent issues on which the Crime Reduction Unit can focus include ongoing – and expensive – issues at the Skate Park as well as drug concerns, not to mention the equipment thefts like those that have plagued local businesses for the past couple of years.
“They did a similar thing in Trail (created a similar unit) four or five years ago, and it works,” he said.
Kevin Chernoff, a city councillor, but also a local businessman whose company, Trowelex, has experienced three major equipment thefts in two years, says it just makes sense to have members dedicated specifically to following up crime patterns rather than just address policing on a situation-by-situation basis.
He said the thefts at Trowelex were among many other, similar thefts from local businesses, in which out-of-town thieves showed up with a shopping list of items and just took what they wanted… which is one of a variety of activities he’d like to see brought to a halt by the new unit.
“What it’s going to do is combine forces in Trail and forces here and let them (police) really focus on ongoing problems,” he said.
New commanding officer Sgt. Laurel Mathew said she’s delighted to have such a unit under her purview.
“Because they’re not always tied to the radio, responding to incoming calls, they’re better equipped to gather intelligence and target specific crimes,” she said.
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