Quiet long weekend for MHPS
By Medicine Hat News on August 6, 2019.
It was a quiet August long weekend for the Medicine Hat Police Service. “It was a very slow weekend in Medicine Hat overall and it’s likely because a lot of people are away on holidays,” Staff-Sgt. Ryan Thorburn told the News on Monday. He said Sunday night was the busiest night for police, where they made some arrests for bail violations, as well as some cases of public intoxication. They also had calls regarding “suspicious vehicles,” a few 911 hangups and missing person calls throughout the weekend. “We’re getting a lot of missing youth this time of year, because they’re all taking off and wanting to be out and about, so we do get files like that,” said Thorburn. These missing persons are usually the result of parents calling the police after their kids didn’t come home overnight. Thorburn says these tends to happen throughout the summer months and are not unique to long weekends. Police deal with two types of suspicious vehicle calls – those concerning people entering vehicles that don’t belong to them and vehicles that appear somewhere they shouldn’t be. “If somebody is parked too long in a vehicle that doesn’t belong there, we will get calls from the public,” Thorburn said. Some of the most common places are near Monsignor McCoy and Saamis Teepee, the result of “teenagers partying,” but can occur anywhere in the city — “parks, roadways, wherever.” Police come across these suspicious vehicles when they’re out patrolling and through tips from the public, he added. “We always check vehicles that seem to be out of place for the time of day,” Thorburn said. “We’re locking the parks now, but if the park doesn’t get locked in time and somebody’s down there wandering on the path, sometimes they leave their vehicles out-and-about, and we check into all of that.” In terms of public intoxication, he says there were “not anything more than the average weekend.” The amount of calls police get over the August long weekend tends to fluctuate from year to year, Thorburn says. “It all depends. You just never know if lots of people are away or we get lots of wild parties, etc.,” he explained. 15-14
