Policing shortages and high crime rates run deeper than the province’s “top-down approach” can solve, Alberta’s new rural municipalities chair says.

Kara Westerlund, elected in November to lead the association, said the RMA welcomes the freeze on payment increases for RCMP services in rural municipalities. But the organization does not see a clear, effective and affordable path forward to maintain order in RMA’s 69 counties and municipal districts.

“We never get anywhere with this top-down approach,” Westerlund told the Macleod Gazette. “The world doesn’t work that way, you push things down and then they work. So there’s a lot of frustration on the municipal side.”

The province announced Nov. 6 that it would absorb a 39 per cent increase in RCMP costs in 2025 that rural and small urban municipalities would otherwise have paid. The freeze remains in effect until the end of March 2026 and will cost the province $27 million.

Recent legislation allows Alberta to create a provincial police force. Critics say it’s part of a plan to replace the RCMP with a provincial service.

The Public Safety Law Amendment Act, 2024 received Royal Assent in May. It paves the way for the police-like functions performed by Alberta sheriffs to be subject to the same type of legislative framework and civilian oversight as Alberta police services.

Deputy Prime Minister Mike Ellis, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services, said the bill was intended to provide oversight and “put troops on the ground” to complement the RCMP and other police services .

“The intention here is to increase and support all policing in Alberta, from north central to southern Alberta,” he told the Gazette earlier this year.

Westerlund said, “I don’t want to knock the sheriffs and boots. They do a great job in our communities and we really appreciate it.”

But municipalities need police officers trained to deal with all situations. Sheriffs sent to rural Alberta focus on specific roles and situations, County Councilor Brazeau said.

Without the freeze, next year’s funding would have been based on 2025 costs instead of the 2018 costs used in the original model. The government attributes this increase to RCMP collective agreements.

The model began in 2020, with affected municipalities paying 10 percent of 2018 costs. The rate increased to 15 percent a year later, to 20 percent the following year and finally to 30 percent in 2023 and 2024 .

In addition to rural municipalities, the increase freeze and expiration funding model applies to small urban municipalities – towns and villages with populations of less than 5,000.

Promise of local consultation

The Department of Public Safety and Emergency Services said in a recent emailed statement to The Gazette that municipalities will have their say before the freeze expires.

“The Alberta government is beginning to plan for in-depth engagement sessions on the police funding model scheduled for next spring,” press secretary Arthur Green said in the release.

“The review will provide an opportunity for small rural municipalities served by the RCMP to provide feedback.”

Once its review is complete, the government “will work with municipalities to determine next steps for the end of 2025,” Green said.

Westerlund lacks confidence in consultation promises. The RMA sits on an interim advisory board for policing in Alberta, and the province hasn’t listened yet, she said.

The committee made a long list of recommendations to a former justice minister and none were implemented, Westerlund said.

“The work was done to pave the way, but someone had to literally take the document and throw it in the trash. They just didn’t give them time.”

The next meeting of the advisory board will take place in January.

“We’re wondering if we’re even going to go there, because the province still has nothing to give us,” Westerlund said.

An RMA position statement on crime and policing addresses “ongoing concerns” about the police funding model, or PFM, which it says has failed to match payments improvements or actual service results. Payments based on an equalized assessment do not meet the varying and unique needs of rural Alberta, the release said.

“Requiring municipalities to contribute to front-line policing without any consultation on how the revenue collected will be used or how additional officers will be distributed across the province reflects cost shifting without increased municipal participation », Indicates the press release.

“All funds collected from municipalities under the PFM must be reinvested in the region in which they were collected.”

For the sake of transparency, municipalities should be allowed to designate the provincial police tax as a separate application on municipal tax notices, says the RMA.

The arguments against replacing the RCMP

Westerlund sees replacing the RCMP as a costly non-solution.

She acknowledged recruitment is a problem, but said it was wrong to blame the RCMP for it, praising the organization for its civilian and non-civilian services, community connections, complaint processes and oversight .

“It’s not the RCMP that’s not putting people where they need to be. That has nothing to do with it. The reality is that people don’t want to be police officers anymore, so there’s a bigger problem there. severe.”

A vacancy rate of nearly 25 percent is a North American phenomenon.

“It’s pretty easy to shift the blame and blame someone else and say it’s your fault, RCMP, for not filling the troops on the ground. But I’ll be the first to say: ‘No, it’s a social problem.'”

Westerlund says the courts and underlying social problems are at the heart of high crime rates in the countryside.

“We have a court problem, a bail problem, a bail scale problem,” said Westerlund, a county councilor for 14 years. “And honestly, if you want to dig deeper, we have a mental health problem.”

The RCMP said in reports released in September that it had 1,772 police positions in Alberta under contract with the province. Of these, 306, or 17 percent, were vacant. But 124 of the vacancies were linked to leave or illness.

Data from Statistics Canada shows that in 2021, Canadian police located in primarily rural jurisdictions reported disproportionately higher crime rates than urban police. Even though they served 15 percent of the provinces’ population, they reported 24 percent of violent crimes, 18 percent of property crimes, 30 percent of Criminal Code traffic violations and 23 percent of other traffic violations. Criminal Code.

The rural-urban gap is also pronounced using another Statistics Canada measure, the Crime Severity Index (CSI), which measures severity and volume to compare crime: more the higher the number, the more serious the problem.

The overall number of CSIs in rural areas was 91.9 in 2021, compared to 69.3 in urban areas.

When it comes to violent crime, a dramatic rural-urban gap emerged between 2011 and 2021. There was virtually no gap in 201: 84.8 rural and 84.9 urban . But the CSI for violent crime in 2021 was 124.1 in rural areas, compared to 85.2 in urban areas.

The RMA’s position statement estimates that crime rates in rural Alberta are 33 percent higher than in urban Alberta. “In many rural areas, residents and businesses perceive crime as a crisis that significantly impacts their quality of life,” the report states.

Westerlund said local is the way to go when it comes to policing Alberta’s less populated areas.

“We are closest to our residents. We are closest to the boots on the ground,” she said.

“My next door neighbor is an RCMP officer. If I have a question for him, I go across the street, knock on his door and find out the truth about what’s really going on. Because these men and women eat and eat. breathe it in every day.