The Slave Lake RCMP has launched its own Crime Reduction Unit as a way to address what police are calling the “increasing complexity” of criminal activity at a local level.
According to the RCMP, the demand for more effective policing strategies has necessitated a shift from reactive investigations to proactive crime prevention.
As a result, the Slave Lake RCMP General Investigation Section implemented several proactive crime prevention techniques to address the priority shift in June. Since then, based on their findings, the Slave Lake RCMP has made the decision to permanently shift resources by moving a number of officers into a new Crime Reduction Unit with a focus on data-driven policing and community collaboration to reduce crime in Slave Lake.
Law enforcement suggests that in many communities, a small group of individuals are frequently responsible for a large amount of the crime, prompting the CRU team to focus on reducing crime rates by targeting “priority offenders” who cause the most harm to the community.
The Slave Lake RCMP maintains that the new shift in priorities does not reflect a spike in crime as crime rates have remained relatively low in past years, and the CRU only aims to reduce the number even further.
Since the beginning of September, Slave Lake has experienced around seven incidents, largely involving property crime, compared to Grande Prairie’s 114 property crime incidents in the same timeframe.
