THE BATTLEFORDS — Despite what a quick Google or social media search would suggest, RCMP Inspector Jesse Gilbert feels that Canada’s most ‘dangerous city,’ isn’t as scary as people outside the community often seem to think. He says it’s more complex than that.
“It’s [the] ‘most dangerous place in Canada,’ but then that should have an asterisk,” he said in a candid interview with the News-Optimist.
He noted that despite having spent roughly 17 years of his service in isolated communities in the North West Territories, Alberta, and a short stint in the Yukon, when he moved to North Battleford in 2022, he was asked if he could handle the work in Saskatchewan's seventh largest city.
Despite a proliferation of comments online about how dangerous 'Crimetown' is — supposedly evidenced by a recent viral Facebook post about a fight on Railway Ave. while a fire raged in the background or by the fact that North Battleford has been the 'most dangerous place in Canada’ as denoted by Statistics Canada's annually published Crime Severity Index (CSI) — contextually, Gilbert said people need to see what’s excluded from the numbers.
In 2022, he noted, most of the Battleford Detachment's complaints were all non-violent and North Battleford’s violent CSI was lower than other municipalities.
“So, if you're using the word ‘dangerous,’ what do you mean by dangerous?" he asked.
In statistics rarely released to the public, Gilbert noted that last year in North Battleford, 64 per cent of victims of crime knew the perpetrator, leaving 36 per cent of victims randomly affected by crime. Factor in the division between violent and non-violent crime? Well, Gilbert said it paints a prettier and more accurate picture.
But he also noted that beyond the 36 per cent, when gang violence is involved, people may often refuse to admit that they even knew the perpetrator, muddying the waters even further.
“And so, when you're looking at that, it could be gang related. It could be family violence, [which] is a big problem … I don't want to minimize those [issues] because they are issues. But if you don't have an abusive partner, and you're not in a gang, you're not really at an elevated risk for being a victim of a violent crime.
“And you see it when you talk to people around the community that if they're not a victim of crime, they say, ‘I don't understand why we have this reputation.’”
Though in theory, the RCMP can use the CSI to determine where they’re seeing increases in certain areas of crime, providing them with an opportunity to create targeted programming, he said the numbers can lose their nuance when used to measure danger, as they have in recent decades.
Gilbert used an example where he noted break and enter's have gone up in the Battlefords for 2022, which are weighted heavily in the CSI as more ‘dangerous’ crimes. But, the CSI doesn't note that most of those increased break-ins involved vacant homes.
“When we were digging into the CSI for last year, what really interested us about the 64 per cent … [was that] a lot of it was family violence,” he said.
Using the CSI in this way allowed the RCMP’s family violence coordinator in Regina to develop a pilot program to address family violence and hopefully stop it before a call to the police is required. Though no specifics can be made public at this time, he said the city has pitched in some money and the program will likely be launched this summer.
“So that's kind of the thing that I think the CSI should be used for,” he added.
Reputation and the resolution
Gilbert said it’s the use of the words ‘dangerous’ and ‘Crimetown’ that are used on social media and in the media that drives fear among residents.
“And you've seen that with research where, moving from the 70s, into the 90s … crime was significantly dropping. But because of the increased media attention on specific violent crimes … people's fear of it was going up because they were seeing it more.
“The numbers were actually going down [in the 90s], but … the anecdotal evidence, right, that ‘I know someone who’ or ‘I heard of [this happening]’ and that builds fear. But even when you talk to people around the community, people like it here, they're happy. Most people feel safe.”
He noted that Prince Albert is another community similar to North Battleford that has pushed back against the numbers. Another key, he added, is the population size of the community, as Tarah Hodgkinson also noted in the March 21 edition of the News-Optimist was of concern.
“We understand [that] this is our population. But we're drawing people in from all these other areas … a lot of communities that are surrounding here that come in for health, they come in for shopping,” he said.
An answer to this issue, he said, is to stop treating crime like it’s a North Battleford problem, but a regional issue that requires more resources to address a multi-faceted problem.
“And I'm not talking about police-specific resources. I'm talking about we need more mental health workers, we need more addictions workers, [maybe] we need crisis vans like they have in Prince Albert.
“I think I've mentioned it … and I think the city's recognized it too, that with a lot of these problems, we're not going to police our way out of it.”
Policing contrasting systemic issues
One point that has been raised by both the City of North Battleford, other municipalities, and even residents of the Battlefords themselves, was that the community has to try and solve systemic issues that plague the Battlefords.
"That [statistic] doesn't speak to any of the inter-generational trauma, doesn't speak to addictions, it doesn't speak to mental health. And those are things that get ignored. Because realistically, if you were saying our numbers are increasing, it's specifically related to addictions. These addictions are tied back to inter-generational trauma," he said
Crime, Gilbert says, is reduced to mental health issues, addictions and a lack of employment.
Despite the forthcoming launch of the RCMP’s domestic violence program, a decrease in motor vehicle crimes — arguably due to awareness campaigns the RCMP has run — and the enforcement work the gang task force has done, some feel that more support for the RCMP could mean less support for the systemic issues.
“When it comes to the homelessness and the addictions, it's hard.”
“I think one thing that a lot of people don't see is how many times we interact with people who are suffering from one of those issues … whether it's addictions or mental health. And very often, the RCMP are the first ones on the front line to be dealing with them. And that's one of the reasons that we need to have good partnerships with the other community agencies because oftentimes, we're the ones that are now dealing with that person.
“We recognize that cells aren't the best place for the majority of people who are suffering from those issues. And if we're the ones that are now confronted with dealing with that person, where can we refer them to … where in the community can we get them some help?”
But if the CSI is used purely as a crime statistic, it will never get better, he noted.
Originally published in the Battlefords Regional News-Optimist on March 28, 2024.
