The budget cuts being applied to the B.C. RCMP, including the Highway of Tears investigation, begs the difficult question of to what degree is policing and prevention the force's main duty, as compared to investigating and solving crimes.
Project E-Pana, the task force charged with investigating the murdered and missing women in the Highway of Tears region, will lose six investigators as part of a $1.4-million cut in spending on major crimes. Project E-Pana has been going for eight years, with as many as 70 investigators working the case, although the number is currently about a dozen, along with support staff.
As open cases age and there are fewer leads to pursue, that is a natural and inevitable occurence to any police investigation. Although Carrier Sekani Tribal Council Chief Terry Teegee is right that it is time for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to order a national inquiry into missing and murdered women, most of them aboriginal, on the nation's highways, his logic is faulty when he says "rather than reducing funding, I think they should be increasing funds considering the fact that some of these cases have reached a dead end."
Hiring more investigators won't make the trail any less colder, particularly when some of the cases are more than 40 years old. The number of investigators and the amount of time and money devoted to the cases doesn't necessarily mean better results. A small, devoted team could be even more effective at generating breakthroughs, rather than a larger organization and the bureaucratic issues that come with the bigger staff.
Furthermore, it lets police devote resources to solving other important cases, as well as to police and prevent crimes from happening in the first place.
For example, awareness campaigns asking drivers to slow down help and a well-located speed trap captures the worst offenders while getting everyone else to ease up on the gas pedal. Neither of those methods, however, is anywhere near as effective as a police car driving on the highway. Even the most excessive speeders behave when there is a police car at the front of the convoy, driving the speed limit.
It's not an either/or proposition, of course, but bringing criminals to justice and bringing closure to victims and their families is the work that becomes necessary when policing and prevention fail. It's necessary work, yet it shouldn't be the first or best use of police resources. Unfortunately, Hollywood movies and TV crime dramas have much more fertile storytelling ground on the investigation side than on the efforts made to stop crime before it happens.
Catching bad guys makes streets safer and it's an easy measurement to quantify. Community policing addresses crime before it happens, meaning that there's not much to measure, except for the absence of crime. With so many variables that can affect crime stats (the authors of the Freakonomics books, for example, argue that a major but unrecognized factor in the decline in the overall U.S. crime rate in the last 40 years was the legalization of abortion), it seems like a waste to send officers on foot patrols, on school visits or simply driving up and down the highway during peak traffic times. They should be out catching bad guys, goes the argument.
Like doctors and nurses, we'll always need law enforcement in our society. In the same way that doctors and nurses like to talk about preventative health because they would rather people avoid illness and disease as much as possible, police officers like preventing crime more than slapping cuffs on offenders.
There is plenty of suffering the world for these professionals to deal with, so stopping a little bit of it from happening in the first place is a good investment. We'll leave know but it might have prevented some of those missing and murdered women from becoming victims in the first place.
