Swift Current City RCMP are shifting their focus for the new fiscal year, based on community consultation, internal conversations, and local trends. 

Two areas of concern include fraud and property crime; these areas will be added to the city detachment’s action plan for the year to try to prevent further incidents and hold the involved individuals accountable.  

Detachment commander Evan Gordon believes that shining a spotlight on crimes of that nature will allow officers to plan and partner with the community and educate people to make themselves less able to be victimized. 

Some collaborative initiatives that are being considered are things like partnering with the business community to standardize staff training, crime prevention methods and crime reporting. 

“The reason that I talk about collaborating with our community partners for crime reporting is that if property crime is occurring but not being reported, it's more difficult for us to identify those trends and commonalities that can, and likely will, assist us in solving not just those crimes, but other related incidents,” he said. “We see quite often that drug use is directly related to a lot of our property crime events. A lot of our smaller property crimes then in turn are related to some of our larger property crimes (business B&Es, theft of vehicles). If we don't know about the little ones ... those could be the pieces that could eventually help us to break the bigger ones open.” 

When it comes to fraud, due to constant new schemes and scams circulating, local officers will be working on education and prevention to reduce the number of victims. 

This includes targeted presentations and meetings with community businesses and financial institution partners to develop educational and cautionary approaches within those locations. Quite often we see people going into a financial institution or into a business.  

Based on trends and conversations last year, the city detachment was focused on drug use and drug use prevention, and traffic safety. However, one matter that continues to be a top priority again is youth and community engagement. 

“In Swift Current, we have a very robust school liaison program,” said Gordon. "It really does allow us not only to provide education on various crime prevention topics like property crime, like fraud, to our younger generation, but it also allows us to build those early relationships with our younger community members who eventually are going to take on those roles of leadership within our community. We're setting that foundation, years earlier.” 

He enunciated that while these three areas are defined as primary concerns, they are not the only thing the detachment will be spending attention on. 

With the commonalities and interconnectivity of crime types, this is a way to look at what’s happening in the community from a different angle while still being aware of and addressing other local concerns. 

“We'll see what the community dictates and what our membership sees, and if we need to readjust for next year or take some of the stuff that we accomplished this year to build on and then focus on another area next year, that can happen,” he said. “It doesn't even need to be year to year – we can certainly make those transitions throughout the year, and we do when we see rashes of one particular crime here or there.”