How has Fort Liard’s community policing program worked out?

Fort Liard’s senior administrator says a community policing pilot program has created a presence in the hamlet that “makes people feel safer.”

Fort Liard prepared a strategic plan roughly a decade ago with a vision of making the hamlet a safer place to live.

In 2021, backed by annual funding of $303,000 for three years, the hamlet and the NWT’s Department of Justice introduced a pilot program. The program has now been extended for two more years.

Hamlet senior administrator John McKee said giving new hires the right training was “quite an effort” when the program started.

With no facility to train in, McKee said people were sent to Manitoba’s Assiniboine College to certify as community safety officers.

Those officers can’t enforce laws. Instead, they are trained to respond to non-criminal concerns. In Fort Liard, they are used to patrol the community, find ways to prevent crime and work closely with RCMP.

The GNWT says the program is “designed to provide a proactive, sustainable, trauma-informed, holistic approach to community safety, and bridge the gap between community safety needs and the role of the RCMP.”

McKee said all three of the current safety officers, one of whom is on maternity leave, were born and raised in the community.

Fort Liard “wanted a little more than what the RCMP could give.” McKee told Cabin Radio this week.

“They also wanted to free up the professionals so they could look after the criminal cases … now we’re starting to see sort-of a different way of doing things, and it’s been quite successful.

“Just the fact that they’re out there, I think, makes people feel safer. Knowing that they’re there and they keep their ears and eyes open … we’re in our third year now, and it’s really starting to develop.”

‘This needed to be done’

McKee said call volumes are up and people increasingly understand the safety officers can help.

He gave the example of officers reporting impaired driving incidents to the police as they patrol the hamlet, or providing a presence at events. He added that safety officers have community knowledge they can pass on to new RCMP officers, who rotate in and out of the hamlet every few years.

The program “was something that needed to be done,” he said. “People had to feel safe in the community.”

Once the pilot ends, McKee hopes the NWT government develops the program and implements it elsewhere.

The pilot won’t end any time soon, even though the funding agreement Fort Liard signed in July 2021 originally expired on March 31 this year.

In an email, the Department of Justice said it had extended the program until March 31, 2026, “as a result of Covid-19 and challenges with recruitment of community safety officers, which delayed the implementation of the program.”

“The program is now fully staffed and operational and provides regular reporting on activities,” the department added.

Fort Liard’s satisfaction with the program comes as police elsewhere in the territory call for more support to handle certain calls – and communities demand more help to face a range of issues.

Following concerns expressed in Fort Smith, RCMP said they feel like “the sole option” for mental health calls. Police have raised with the NWT government the prospect of adding specially trained nurses to help respond to such incidents, a model used in some other Canadian jurisdictions.

In Gamètì, local leaders have complained that without a detachment, the community is left at the mercy of drug dealers when officers aren’t on a fly-in visit. Gamètì has requested at least one full-time police officer.

Community safety officers’ roles are limited, but McKee said other communities have expressed a desire for a similar program in the absence of a full-time RCMP presence.

McKee thinks it would be possible to train residents of other communities who want to become safety officers, allowing the project to expand in other parts of the territory.

“Just the fact that they know the people – they’re going in and they know the background of who they’re dealing with. Sometimes the RCMP don’t know who they’re actually dealing with. I think that’s important,” he said.

Mike Argue, a director at the Department of Justice, said the department has not received any formal requests from other communities to fund a similar community safety officer program.