Crime is up and police presence is down on the Sunshine Coast, RCMP Sgt. Steve Chubey told members of the Sunshine Coast Policing Committee on Nov. 2.
Chubey said the local detachment ran on “almost critical” numbers this past summer and that due to vacancies and some members being restricted to light duties, the detachment is still in need of five able-bodied members to join their ranks.
“If you look at it, we have five roadable resources that are in need right now and those are affecting mostly our support units, our serious crime unit, one of our First Nations policing units and our youth position,” Chubey said.
Added to the decrease in RCMP presence has been an increase in property crime and Criminal Code offences. From September 2014 to September of this year, crimes against persons went up 127 per cent in Sechelt and Criminal Code offences rose by 233 per cent.
Chubey said that while some of the increase in crime between 2014 and 2015 can be related to a new way of scoring offences, the increase in property crime could be directly related to a lack of RCMP officers.
“I think resourcing had a lot to do with that. We’d like to have our teams out there doing surveillance on our prolific or high-risk offenders, but with our resources being as they were, we were forced to take from our plainclothes units, our support units in order to supplement the watches,” Chubey said. “That’s greatly affected our ability to be proactive.”
The Sunshine Coast RCMP detachment has put in requests for more officers, particularly in light of some anticipated retirements on the horizon. However, committee members were told, it’s not easy to secure new members right now.
“There’s only so many people going through Depot at a time,” Chubey said, referring to the RCMP training division.
“Another thing that has happened that delayed some of our recruits coming in was the shooting in Ottawa last year. Every second troop in Depot is being tasked with going to do a two-month rotation in Ottawa for security purposes.”
Chubey said the security detail using new recruits will continue until Ottawa gets something permanent set up.
“Hopefully that gets established soon so we can start getting them straight from Depot into their positions,” he added.
