A 42-year-old man is in police custody in connection to a break-in early Sunday morning at a downtown business.
Prince George RCMP received a call from a security company after a commercial alarm was triggered at a business in the 1400 block of Third Avenue. Within seconds, frontline officers were on the scene. They saw the man attempt to run away and he then turned around and went back into the building.
RCMP spokesman Cpl. Craig Douglass said there were concerns the man was armed with a weapon but it turned out he wasn’t. To protect their own safety the officers called in the RCMP North District’s Emergency Response Team, which brought a service dog to assist them. At about 7:30 a.m. the man was arrested and transported to hospital for treatment of minor wounds and he was transported back to holding cell at the RCMP detachment.
“The dog didn’t go in, he came out and tried to get away and at that point the dog was deployed,” said Douglass. “The entire time he was trying to figure out a way to flee and we were trying to convince him to give up and come out. His whole mindset was on trying to get away.”
He will be held in custody overnight and will appear in court on Monday using a teleconference link.
During the five-hour takedown, parts of Third and Fourth avenues and a section of Brunswick Street were closed to the public.
Douglass says there are fewer people on the streets and there’s been a noticeable drop in crime the past few weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sunday’s crime scene is a block away from the RCMP detachment on Victoria Street and the rapid response of police no doubt aided in the arrest.
“Our frontline officers are deployed throughout the community and especially during this COVID time we deploy our resources where they’re needed and we’re certainly concerned with the downtown, although our stats show we’re down a bit, which is great,” said Douglass.
“There are less people out and less people downtown, and the other side of that is there is a lack of business owners and patrons downtown to be witnesses to prevent things just by being there. There are a lot of empty buildings and stores so certainly that’s a concern for us, but so far we haven’t seen any kind of spike in that area.”
The police are continuing their investigation.
