Alberta law enforcement agencies have joined forces to identify and eliminate the province’s top offenders.

Details of a new data system were announced Friday. This is an RCMP-led initiative that allows different police services across Alberta to share offender information with each other.

“The reality is that criminals don’t care about borders,” said RCMP Supt. Mike McCauley.

“They operate in multiple jurisdictions, harming communities across the province.”

The new system helped officers identify Alberta’s top 10,000 offenders – and arrest nearly 1,000 of them in two weeks.

“That’s a pretty high number,” McCauley said. “There would probably be about 1,200 over a full month normally. So it’s quite substantial.”

The charges include serious crimes such as theft, robbery, drug trafficking, sexual offenses and attempted murder.

Nearly all of the offenders identified are repeat offenders, McCauley said.

“In every community, their crimes would not have designated them as a priority offender for this detachment,” McCauley said. “However, when we combined our data, we realized they were among the top 1,000 offenders in the province.”

In the Edmonton area alone, McCauley said the data helped execute 250 warrants and arrest 108 people, four of whom were among the top 100 offenders.

“Forty-five offenders each had two warrants, with a total of 226 charges between the 90 warrants,” he said. “Nine offenders had three warrants each for a total of 76 charges…So we’re talking about people who are causing a lot of harm to our communities.”

A similar operation is expected to take place soon in Calgary and southern Alberta.

Participating officers cannot work on the initiative all year round, so it is planned to carry out one or two large-scale operations each year.