According to new statistics, the RCMP's Downtown Enforcement Unit has made crime numbers go both up and down in their first year of existence.
The biggest drop from 2009-10 to 2010-11 was the number of people intoxicated in public. There were 713 of those calls for service during the year before the DEU was created, but 285 once the police team was focused on the downtown beat - a drop of 428 cases.
The next biggest decline was in the number of disturbances. There were 672 the year before the DEU and 440 after the downtown unit was underway.
Also reduced significantly were thefts of motor vehicles, thefts from motor vehicles and suspicious persons/vehicles/occurrences. These went down by eight per cent to 22 per cent.
The biggest jumps were in the numbers of violators caught in breech of their bail conditions (from 44 to 85) and probation conditions (36 to 49), and in the number of people found consuming alcohol (from 26 to 45) and possessing cocaine (21 to 31).
"These can be directly attributed to officer-generated files as a result of increased patrols and presence in the downtown area," said Prince George RCMP spokesman Cpl. Craig Douglass.
Some categories went down because the presence of the police chased out the element, or arrested the few suspects who were causing chronic problems, Douglass said, and some categories increased because the police were there to spot that type of infraction firsthand, like the bail/probation violators, and the drug/alcohol cases.
It all amounts to a cleaner overall slate, downtown, said Cpl. Kent MacNeill, officer in charge of the DEU.
"We are very pleased with the significant reduction in crime downtown and intend to continue our targeted enforcement efforts to reduce the crime rate even further," he said. "These results were achieved as a result of the hard work and dedication of a few police officers who have spent countless hours walking the beat, conducting patrols, responding to all calls for service and most importantly building relationships with the street-involved people, the service providers and local businesses."
The message back to police from the business community was to keep their enforcement foot on the gas.
"The Downtown Business Improvement Association is very encouraged by these numbers and the direction they are headed," said DBIA president Carla Johnston. "We see this program as having a meaningful impact on the safety and comfort of our downtown patrons."
MacNeill acknowledged that there has been some displacement outside of the downtown core as a result of the police push, but the RCMP has responders for suspects and incidents wherever they might be in the city, and stakeholder participation was being encouraged to deal with the root causes of street-level criminal activity.
