Meet two experts looking to help make Hay River safer

At a March public meeting about public safety in Hay River, lessons from a psychologist and a new approach to community development were among ideas to help the town tackle crime and make the community safer.

The meeting heard that Timothy Parker – a now-retired University of Alberta psychology professor – would be brought in by the Rotary Club to speak about the psychology of addiction.

In late March, Parker travelled to Hay River and spoke with six groups in three days. Those included Premier RJ Simpson and minister Vince McKay, who are the town’s two MLAs, as well as members of the Healthy Communities Committee that ran the March public meeting.

Parker also presented to members of city council, protective services staff, healthcare providers and residents at the town library.

His book, Trapped by the High, explains the neuroscience of addiction and its effect on the brain.

“It’s essentially translation of the neuroscience into a narrative that a general audience can understand,” said Parker.

His talks, he said, have the ultimate goal of creating greater empathy and understanding for people who use alcohol or drugs while dispelling common misconceptions.

“I would venture to say the people who hear my talk leave it with at least a better understanding of how to encounter someone who is addicted,” said Parker, “or how to conceptualize someone who is addicted as being not weak-willed, but just being trapped, essentially.”

In Hay River, Parker said he was asked about how childhood trauma influences addiction and why some people relapse when they return from treatment programs.

“Everybody thought it was really valuable,” said Parker.

“I hope I’ve given them information on which they can base their approach to policy.”

Doing neighbourhoods differently

At the March meeting, a representative from Housing NWT also spoke about introducing a program called SmartGrowth, said to integrate safety and crime prevention with community development and planning.

Tarah Hodgkinson, a criminologist and assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, is a SmartGrowth specialist.

Hodgkinson said SafeGrowth is “a methodology for how we do neighbourhoods differently.”

She said she helps to support residents, business owners and local leadership with crime prevention and community development, which she believes can be addressed in tandem.

Hodgkinson said communities have approached her to help tackle everything from low-level property crime to drug and gang-related violence.

The help the SafeGrowth program offers comes in the form of training for residents and leaders over two to three days.

“We focus a lot on some of the basic understandings of the social ecology of crime,” said Hodgkinson. “How does crime occur at the local level, and what are some of the strategies to prevent it?”

The training also offers discussion of community-building and what it takes to create strong and integrated neighbourhoods.

After the training sessions are complete, communities develop their own projects and strategies before practitioners return six to eight weeks later to offer feedback and support.

Hodgkinson said that part also involves matching up perception with reality.

She explained that she worked with one community that thought it had a big car theft problem when, in reality, only one vehicle had been stolen from the neighbourhood in the previous five years.

“It impacted the community – it became a very important part of their story – but it wasn’t consistent with what was actually happening on the ground,” said Hodgkinson.

She said successful implementations of the program have taken place in Hollygrove, Louisiana and North Battleford, Saskatchewan.

In Hollygrove, a neighbourhood of New Orleans, the community was struggling with drug and gang-related violence that resulted in a high homicide rate, Hodgkinson said.

“A lot of our folks – our participants – were retired, and they had lived in this community that had just been decimated by the floods [caused by hurricane Katrina], and they were really struggling to see how much their community had fallen apart, but also just to respond to anything of what was happening,” said Hodgkinson.

She said SafeGrowth helped the neighbourhood start a community garden that enabled youth to grow their own food in what was previously considered a food desert.

Hollygrove also started a walking program for older women called Soul Steppers that had people walking in a park previously well known for drug and gang activity.

“[It] really provided some of that natural surveillance, because nobody really wants to conduct a drug deal in front of their grandmothers,” said Hodgkinson.

Through efforts that stemmed from the program, Hodgkinson said Hollygrove rebuilt a community centre scheduled for demolition and animated local parks with sports and other activities.

“It was an incredibly successful project,” said Hodgkinson.

“They were dealing with about 20 to 25 homicides a year when we started and, in the last five years, I think they’ve had one homicide, maybe two. So it’s been an absolute success story for them.”

A Canadian case study

North Battleford has struggled with a high crime severity index – recently the highest in the country by one measure, though the city and other communities have said the index should not be used to determine overall safety of a community, in part because population size may skew it.

Through the SafeGrowth program, Hodgkinson said North Battleford created a “paint up” project at one intersection that bring people together once a year to make the area more visually appealing.

This has an added traffic safety benefit, Hodgkinson explained, because people tend to slow down when they see bright colours.

The city also incentivized businesses to open in a downtown that was struggling and worked with a shelter to build a community garden, which Hodgkinson said helped with beautification while providing food for the shelter and integrating people experiencing homelessness into the community.

Hodgkinson said North Battleford also created a program that funded community events to build social cohesion.

“What’s impressive for them, impressive for Hollygrove and many of the other case studies that we have is just the continuity of what they’re doing,” said Hodgkinson.

“They’re building these skills, they have this capacity, they’re building local leadership, and they’re able to continue those efforts long after we’re there.”

(A spokesperson for the City of North Battleford said, though, that no city leaders who were part of its SmartGrowth workshops in 2015 are still there, and many of the initiatives that stemmed from the workshops have ended.)

Hodgkinson said she has been in touch with Hay River – as well as other NWT communities – but when or how SafeGrowth could be implemented in the territory hasn’t yet been confirmed.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said the department and Housing NWT recently became aware of SafeGrowth, and information sessions about the program with community leaders are under way.