Downtown foot patrol off for the winter
By JEREMY APPEL on November 23, 2019.
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel The Medicine Hat Police Service’s downtown foot patrol unit is going into hibernation for the winter. Insp. Brent Secondiak says that although the initiative was largely successful, police resources could be better spent elsewhere in the winter months, since there are fewer people out on the streets in the cold. Downtown is defined by the MHPS as the area from North Railway to the river, to the library, to the Fifth Street Dairy Queen and back to South Railway. The project was piloted during the summer months with the possibility it would be continued into the rest of the year. MHPS decided to keep it going for 75 per cent of the year, he said. “We won’t truly know the total impact until we do another survey, because part of the issue was not only crime but the fear of crime and that’s something we can’t measure in our crime data,” said Secondiak. These surveys are conducted every four years and the last one took place two years ago, he added. Ninety per cent of the patrols occurred on foot, while the remaining 10 per cent took place on ATVs, according to Secondiak. He says there will, of course, be a police presence downtown throughout the winter, but it will be limited to one officer patrolling in their vehicle, unless special events necessitate an enhanced presence. In a presentation to the Medicine Hat Police Commission on Thursday evening, Sgt. Jeff Wieschorster highlighted four specific instances to give the commission a sense of the types of incidents the unit dealt with. “The four files he highlighted were people in the downtown core who were obstructing police, refusing to provide their names. One of them, somebody was actively injecting drugs into their arm and they charged the person with possessing fentanyl,” Secondiak explained. The other two files involved suspects fleeing from police on foot when they attempted to arrest them. Secondiak concedes offences like loitering and simple drug possession are minor, but says the unit is mainly concerned with perceptions of public safety, which are subjective. “We had very few violent offences directly against the public, which in our minds are higher priority, but I would say that the perception of violence and fear of crime in the downtown core has been, and typically is, higher than anywhere else,” he said. “People typically just feel unsafe if there’s somebody around with needles. It’s the fear of crime that is the bigger issue here, rather than the actual crime stats.” 16-15
