Yellowknife RCMP plan increased presence in downtown core

Yellowknife RCMP announced a plan to increase their presence in the downtown core, with more foot, bike and vehicle patrols.

Insp. Kurtis Pillipow, of the ‘G’ Division Yellowknife RCMP Detachment, said there will be a focus on “intelligence gathering” along with “spearheading” initiatives to tackle issues like distracted driving.

Insp. Pillipow told the city council today that the proposed current fiscal year RCMP annual performance plan priorities include three main goals. The first goal Pillipow named was crime reduction. Reconciliation and Community Leadership Engagement, which includes building strong relationships with Indigenous communities and residents, was underscored as the second goal. Pillowpol called attention to road safety as the third of these main goals.

Pillipow presented council with the RCMP’s plan and opened up the discussion to council for feedback on objectives and initiatives to be developed, to address the plan’s priorities. 

Councillor Garett Cochrane raised questions around the plan’s priorities for particular zones, within the city, specifically the downtown core and mentioned that council has identified areas of the city for consideration.

“Last week we did pass motion, specifically reiterating streets that we would like to see patrols or more emphasis on and just wondering if you are already receptive towards that,” Councillor Cochrane asked Insp. Pillipow.

“We have an interest in safer communities and certainly one of our priorities, regardless of whether or not it’s adopted and put into our strategic plan for this year. When we talk about harm reduction in the community, it’s kind of from different scales. Whether it’s what we see street level, kind of disruptions of people’s businesses and day-to-day lives up to more than organized crime in terms of state-listed illicit drug trafficking, for example,” replied Pillipow.

“So we do have a plan in place and we are collaborating with MED from the city here, to enhance our physical presence in the downtown area, whether it be foot, patrols, or bicycle patrols, we are often in the communities travelling to and from, but it’s not always recognisable particularly if we’re in a police vehicle driving from point A to point B. We do want to strive to increase our presence in the downtown area,” he added.

“Your presence will be instrumental in acting as a deterrence here,” emphasized Cochrane.

Councillor Ryan Fequet asked for more details on the priorities and what those actions would involve.

Pillipow. replied that crime reduction interruption would have a focus on intelligence gathering regarding “more for the larger scale, more impactful harms” to the community and look at the “best opportunities” to disrupt that.

“But our actual resources that we have and on the same stream focus on initiatives that are the lowest in resource investment, but yet still have impact for the greater community and presence in the community,” he said. 

“Presence in the community is going to be one of the paramount features just because officer presence can do so much to deter and disrupt crime at many levels,” he added.

The second of the RCMP’s priorities has to do with speaking more openly among community partners and leaders.

“Reconciliation and community engagement, specifically with leadership. I’ve been doing that already. We have been doing that already as a collective to ensure that we have open minds of communication. It can have, I think, at times formal and informal conversation so that we can share messages, share information and just speak freely with each other,” said Pillipow.

Continuing dialogues across community and organizational leadership would be necessary to address the identified priorities, but in and of itself, communication was described as integral to each of the three RCMP goals.

“And I would like to continue to be doing that, especially in terms of identifying mutually beneficial efforts that we can collaborate on. And again, enhance police presence in the downtown area as well as different venues like community events and events just like this,” he said.

Insp. Pillipow emphasized officer presence as one of the main ways the force would achieve its identified priorities. 

Road safety measures were outlined as being more “self-explanatory” in nature.

Councillor Fequet explained that focusing on added patrols in areas where children are spending time, such as school zones, was a priority that council had identified to keep youth, who are considered a vulnerabilized group,  safe.

“Making sure that our most vulnerable population kids in those areas, there’s extra eyes, extra presence in those spaces. So I guess I was just curious about is that something you’ve had a chance to reflect on or collaborate on with anybody about how to either support or complement MED in that space or or let them focus on that as one of their top priorities and kind of look after many of the other Road Safety elements,” said Fequet.

Insp. Pillipow responded that these priorities are in line with what the RCMP is responsible for and said there was an opportunity to “collaborate and support” the different partners in reaching those goals.

Councillor Rob Warburton inquired about current staffing levels in the city’s police force.

The city’s police force is facing “human resource pressures” and is not fully staffed. To navigate those challenges, the force is collaborating with “internal and external” partners to provide the “best services they can,” he said. The city’s police force is also anticipating new recruits in the near future, said Pillipow.

“We are not fully staffed and our staffing Personnel are I believe making extraordinary efforts to enhance the Staffing levels, not just that our detachment across the division. We do have some human resource pressures and we’ll continue for the foreseeable future, although we fortunately benefit from or I benefit from benign in a detachment where people want to be, people want to live and commute here. So we do certainly have some incoming and mitigate the shortfalls we have right now. We’re certainly just collaborating with our internal external partners to provide the best service that we can,” Pillipow asserted.