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KAMLOOPS - Requests for RCMP service in Kamloops are down by nearly 1,000 calls this year after an "anomaly" year in 2016.

One of the detachment's biggest priorities is crime reduction in the city, and according to a quarterly report prepared by Kamloops RCMP Supt. Brad Mueller, their strategies appear to be working.

Calls for service dropped by two per cent in the second quarter of this year compared to the same time last year, while criminal offences are up less than one per cent.

Crimes like breaking and entering at businesses, residences and other places are down across the board from April to June of this year, compared to the same time period last year.

Property crimes have decreased overall by 1.6 per cent with more than 30 fewer files reported. Breaking and entering homes has gone down by more than 30 per cent.

There are still slight increases in some areas like theft of motor vehicles and theft from motor vehicles. The latter is an issue Kamloops RCMP has been trying to hammer home to residents for more than a year, but in the past three months calls for theft from vehicles increased by more than 11 per cent.

In a police committee meeting today, July 31, Mueller said crimes like theft from vehicles are a crime of opportunity. Police have been vocal about locking vehicles and not leaving valuables inside.

According to the quarterly report, police have taken a number of steps to continue seeing numbers go down. Police conducted nearly 700 high-visibility street checks of known offenders in the community this quarter, more than 600 curfew checks on prolific and priority offenders, and actively used the bait car and bait bike programs.

"Our second quarter runs from April to June and historically it’s the busiest quarter we face in a year," Mueller said. "Some of the things we can attribute (the decrease) to is the collaborative approach we’ve taken with our partner agencies. We’ve created a downtown and street enforcement team, we were better prepared, we were able to hit the streets earlier and we had partnerships in place based on the lessons learned from 2016."

Mueller said 2016 could be called an anomaly year for Kamloops, with higher than normal calls for service this time last year. He attributes part of that to an influx of marginalized or transient people from across the country coming to Kamloops.

According to new numbers from Statistics Canada, 2016 was in fact a year out of the norm for the city.  Kamloops' crime severity index was measured at just over 128 last year, up 47 per cent from the year prior.

Traffic safety remains a priority for the detachment, which handed out 1,454 driving violation tickets during the second quarter of the year.

Drug offences also dropped by more than 10 per cent from April to June of this year compared to the same time last year.

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News from © iNFOnews, 2017