City of Grande Prairie administration has been asked to take a look at how online, non-emergency police reporting could be used in the region.
Mayor Bill Given thinks residents expect to see the right resources deployed in the right situation and at the right time when it comes to community safety and this is an example of how the citu could possibly do that better.
“I think people would recognize there are a lot of situations that don’t call for an armed RCMP member to show up at your door for you to report a simple issue.”
“There are many other situations where we do want faster, armed police response, and the goal here would be to make sure residents have a way to report incidents that they need to, perhaps for insurance purposes, and that reporting process wouldn’t’ take up the valuable time of members who should be out on the street,” he adds.
Given says the quest for information on the resource, which is being used in bigger cities like Vancouver and Calgary, is not to take work away from the RCMP, but to try to make the reporting system and deployment system more efficient.
He adds that it’s not the first time the city has looked to technology to potentially try to find efficiencies in police services.
“This is really in line with our approach to try and regularly innovate on the way police services are delivered in Grande Prairie. I think you can draw a direct line from our collision reporting centre, the first of its kind in Canada for an RCMP jurisdiction, to this sort of approach, which says there are better ways to do this job than have been done in the past and we are open to looking at all of those different ways.”
No timeline has been given as to when city administration will return to the council with its findings.