Two Prince George city councillors will give a notice of motion at the July 14 city council meeting that they want to discuss holding a business and retail crime forum, but a couple of members of the city’s public safety committee say that it won’t make much of a difference unless it leads to action.
The motion that councillors Tim Bennett and Kyle Sampson want to discuss with their colleagues at the July 28 meeting directs city administration to facilitate the forum at an unspecified future date.
It would request “participation from the RCMP, and invited representatives from the retail and business community, including organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Prince George to represent local and small-scale retailers, and an invitation for staff from the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General to participate.”
An attached report states that the forum isn’t intended to direct the RCMP’s work or step into challenges faced by the private sector, “about making sure the City is doing what it can, within its lane, to support a safer business environment, and in turn, a safer community.”
John Zukowski, the owner of Pacific Body Jewellery & Piercing and a member of the city’s Standing Committee on Public Safety, said previous similar events haven’t led to much.
“The last big thing they (council) did was the open house for community safety,” he said in a Friday, July 11 phone interview. “They had the RCMP there and they had that facilitator come up from I think it was Kelowna … it amounted to a nothingburger."
The city held a community safety town hall on May 28, 2024.
Zukowski said he feels similarly about items raised at both public safety committee and city council meetings. A lot of the time, he said that administration responds to questions on public safety by saying that they’ll return with further information but doesn’t seem to work on resolving the issues.
Earlier this year, the committee discussed the idea of hiring private security patrols to go through the downtown core overnight when bylaw officers aren’t on duty.
While Zukowski said he liked the idea, he didn’t like the proposal that it be funded through a local area service tax on area businesses and he thought the estimated $500,000 annual cost cited by city staff was inflated.
“The City of Prince George is required to provide policing,” he said. “We’re being taxed for the provision of policing. Why are we having to pay more for a specific area that has a crime issue?”
Both this year and last year, the city has discussed a downtown security camera pilot project in partnership with Downtown Prince George and the Prince George Chamber of Commerce. Council voted to contribute $40,000 to the project last December.
He said he feels like the committee rarely has open discussions because administration wants to control the narrative, something he doesn’t see happens with other committees he’s looked at.
Zukowski, who also owns and operates security company Advanced Security Concepts, said that amount of money will likely only be enough to purchase one or two cameras as well as the costs of having them monitored.
“I’ve never seen any other committees that haven’t had open, heartful dialogue, going ‘well, let’s look at this, let’s talk about this,’” Zukowski said. “We’re not allowed to do that. I was bringing up … the disgusting state of some of the closed building and vacant lots in downtown and Simon (Yu) popped off right away about putting up fencing, putting flower paintings on them.”
That, he said, is like putting lipstick on a pig. Instead, he said the city needs to deal with graffiti, vandalism and broken windows because otherwise it sends a signal that nobody cares about the buildings they’re damaging.
Before the current public safety committee was formed last year, Zukowski said he was on former mayor Lyn Hall’s Select Committee on a Clean, Safe and Inclusive Downtown.
Over the last 10 years, he said the city has tried to address downtown crime in fits and starts and after initial success, things start to get ignored.
Karm Manhas, owner of Kaiten Mixed Martial Arts Academy on Dominion Street near the intersection with Second Avenue since 2010, joined the public safety committee earlier this year after the resignation of former Lheidli T’enneh councillor Robert Gagnon.
Though his isn’t a retail operation, he said he’s still been affected by crime.
“Someone broke in through my roof and broken through the brick walls right here,” he said during a July 11 interview at the gym, pointing to a corner of one of the rooms.
“There’s still major damage stuff. There’s brand new graffiti on the back of my building. Daily at 6:30 in the morning, I ask people to leave and then they won’t communicate, they don’t look at you. They just swear at you and move. I don’t like this in my front door.”
Separated by a small alley parking lot from Kaiten is the St. Vincent de Paul Society drop-in centre on Second Avenue.
Over the years, Manhas said he’s seen the demographics of those who drop by for meals and other assistance change. As well, the method through which food is distributed has changed due to safety concerns.,
In his time owning Kaiten, Manhas said he can recall two or three instances of meetings organized by the city with businesses to hear their concerns after which no solutions were implemented.
“It’s just not happening,” he said. “Too much talking.”
Beyond issues under the city’s purview, Manhas said he also feels like offenders aren’t being prosecuted after being arrested.
“The response of the police is good, (but) they can’t do anything,” he said. “And you can sense it and feel it … it doesn’t matter what you do, there will be no charges. There will be nothing, it doesn’t matter the evidence.”
Even if a security camera project is set up, Manhas said it won’t mean anything if it doesn’t lead to charges being laid.
Despite his concerns, he said he would still participate in a forum if it gets organized because there are peoples’ livelihoods on the line.
Tony Hunt, who manages loss prevention for all of London Drugs’ locations across four provinces, told the Citizen in a July 10 phone interview that the Prince George location has more incidents than might be expected for a market of its size.
In the last four months, he said there have been 150 incidents.
“We have more resources in that store than we do at most stores,” he said. “We’ve made a larger investment security wise. There’s more people to address issues in that store. It is one of our busiest locations in the province for any sort of issues.”
In Prince George, he said a lot of incidents at the London Drugs are caused by people from outside the community.
“It is a very busy place when it comes to crime that comes in from out of the community and into our place of business,” Hunt said.
“And the greatest concerns for us in something like that is, like most businesses in town, we’re doing our best to make sure that our people are safe and that it’s a nice comfortable and safe environment for everyone to shop and work. That’s challenging to do with some of the difficulties that we’ve seen with increasing crime in the community.”
Hunt said crimes they see typically fall into one of two categories. The first is subsistence crime, people who steal because they’re hungry, thirsty or need something like a bandage.
“Quite honestly, as a business, we learn to sort of screen those down or turn it into a recovery situation or something where we can actually even help somebody occasionally,” he said. “But we also have people who are stealing because they have a need to pay off a debt or somebody’s who’s stealing to order. And we have those who travel through and take large-scale thefts.”
The items most frequently targeted for thefts, he said, are what they call “fast-moving consumer goods,” things that can be sold on online marketplaces or shipped to resellers or criminal markets where they get fenced.
Hunt said London Drugs has a great relationship with policing agencies in the communities where it has locations as well as BC’s Save Our Streets Coalition.
Through its work with other businesses, he said public-facing businesses of any size are dealing with the same challenges.
“They’re dealing with repeat offenders who are being released repeatedly,” he said.
“There seems to be, for them, this perception that the system itself is really not tooled to get an outcome where they feel safe. Police are oftentimes frustrated by a lack of resources and the inability to do any sort of prevention systems or work with the community to project from future events happening. It’s all reactive and responsive because of the amount of resources.”
If Prince George ends up holding a forum, Hunt said, taking a holistic approach could be really valuable to find a way to interrupt the circumstances that allows crimes to continue to be committed in the community.
Downtown Prince George, a business improvement area made up of property owners and businesses in the city’s downtown core, told the Citizen in an email that it has helped its members deal with four buildings with broken windows, seven buildings that have been graffitied, five fires set in alleyways or sidewalks, a vehicle window getting smashed and an owner having a machete pulled on them in the first six months of 2025.
In 2024, they dealt with 10 buildings with broken windows, 22 buildings with graffiti and 12 fires in alleyways or on sidewalks.
There were also garbage bins whose locks were cut, a makeshift living area set up in Downtown Prince George’s parking area, vandalism to large flower baskets, DPG’s fob access plate was torn off its wall and an Eco Cube garbage can next to St. Vincent’s de Paul’s drop-in centre was vandalized in 2024.
“Businesses in the downtown core continue to grapple with ongoing criminal activity that is impacting both operations and safety,” executive director Chrisie Berry said in an email. “The crime ranges from vandalism and break-ins to threatening incidents involving weapons.”
