City, BPS receiving $370K for public safety

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This article was published 13/07/2024 (701 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Funding public-safety efforts was on provincial Justice Minister Matt Wiebe’s mind when he visited Brandon late this week, announcing money for both the city and its police service.

At an invitation-only public safety summit at the Keystone Centre on Thursday evening, Wiebe announced that the City of Brandon would receive $100,000 to put toward improving public safety downtown. The announcement came on the heels of Winnipeg receiving $1.5 million for downtown public safety efforts.

Then on Friday afternoon, Wiebe announced the Brandon Police Service would be receiving $270,000 from the criminal property forfeiture fund to purchase equipment for officers and support community initiatives.

In an interview with the Sun Friday morning, Wiebe said the $100,000 was provided to the city after it expressed interest in Winnipeg’s Downtown Community Safety Partnership program.

“In this case, the mayor and the city have been very clear that they’re interested in this model,” Wiebe said. “They brought it up with us and they want to pursue it, so we’re stepping up to support them.”

The Winnipeg program aims to improve downtown safety by offering after-hours courtesy walks for community members, well-being checks on unsheltered people and voluntary transport to shelters.

Mayor Jeff Fawcett told the Sun that the city will be sitting down with various local community groups to figure out what a model for the program would look like in Brandon. He said the city will consider options for that model, including expanding Bear Clan or the BPS community cadets program.

“Originally, of course, our discussions were around the Downtown Community Safety Partnership in Winnipeg, but as we dug into it further, we realized, OK, we’re not exactly the same,” he said. “This isn’t a cut-and-paste model for lots of different reasons. And the government also realizes that.”

Wiebe said the $100,000 would assist in “starting that immediate action,” but the province would remain in conversations with the city about further funding.

Though the province would not provide a list of who was invited to Thursday’s summit, the Sun attended and identified just under 30 people, including Sport, Culture, Heritage and Tourism Minister and Brandon East MLA Glen Simard, Fawcett, Coun. Shaun Cameron (Ward 4), interim police chief Randy Lewis, Brandon Fire and Emergency Services deputy fire chief Jason Potter and members of various community organizations, including the Brandon Friendship Centre.

Participants were split up into smaller groups to discuss questions on a worksheet provided by the minister, which he says will provide information that will help the province develop its public safety strategy, to be announced in the fall.

“That document will give an outline of where our government is heading and really start to address those (public safety) issues head-on,” Wiebe said.

At the meeting, groups shared the results of their discussions, highlighting issues of food insecurity, addictions and mental health. Solutions were focused on improving the economic factors of high costs of living and job shortages, fixing the Child and Family Services system, improving access to victim services, improving the diversity and culture of police, and giving youth more options to spend their time productively.

Wiebe said his government does not have plans to host a public meeting to collect input for the strategy before it is released but added the public can send feedback to the province through its website.

Meanwhile, after learning about the invitation-only meeting, Progressive Conservative justice critic and Brandon West MLA Wayne Balcaen raised concerns about the government hand-picking who it wanted to receive feedback from.

“I understand that the justice minister may have had another private, by invite-only session in Brandon to talk about crime and developing a plan,” Balcaen told the Sun. “But just like the Winnipeg summit, I did not receive any invitation or notification. If (the province) is truly looking at engaging the public, you’d think that they would also want to engage the MLA for the area that they’re having conversations in and maybe leverage some of my experience.”

The former Brandon police chief said he has reached out to the justice minister offering a non-partisan approach to work in collaboration with the downtown safety partnership in Brandon.

He said he was “perplexed” by the government only providing $100,000 and noted that the previous PC government provided Winnipeg’s downtown safety program with its initial funding and before the election had promised $2 million for a program in Brandon.

“The NDP has stated that they’re going to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, but I haven’t seen any action on that,” Balcaen said. “There is no plan. Anything that I have seen has been piecemeal announcements and Band-Aid solutions (and) no long-term plan.”

Friday’s announcement of $270,000 for the Brandon Police Service also promised improvements to public safety in Brandon.

The funding — granted to BPS through the province’s criminal property forfeiture fund — will be used to fund the organized crime unit and mental health supports for officers and to purchase handheld drug-testing devices, medical equipment and ballistic blankets.

In an interview with the Sun, interim chief Lewis said the drug-testing devices will contribute to officer safety as they can test and identify drugs in the field. Test results will still need to be conducted in a lab for court purposes.

He said funds will be used to purchase new technology and training for the organized crime unit and to buy two ballistic blankets, which the city has already issued a tender for. Lewis said the blankets will improve officer safety as the BPS responds to firearm calls “many times a year.”

When asked about how the purchases would reduce crime in the city, Lewis provided examples of other items that the funding would be used for, including police initiatives to build relationships with the community, especially among Indigenous people, and tools for a program to help teach kids how to safely use pedestrian crosswalks, which they hope to roll out in the coming school year.

The government’s decision to grant the money to the police service was criticized by Brandon University sociology professor Christopher Schneider, who said that what the funds are slated to be used for will not reduce crime.

“This money would be better spent investing in services that we know empirically lead to reductions in crime,” he told the Sun. “And that would be services that help victims of crime, affordable housing for people, education (and) rehabilitation services.”

Schneider, who has written extensively on policing, said the government’s tagline of being “tough on crime” and “tough on the causes of crime” are two things that are incompatible and questioned the criminal property forfeiture legislation, which only allows law enforcement agencies to apply to receive funds that are generated from the proceeds of unlawful activity.

“If we are going to keep distributing money back to police, then there needs to be some sort of clear evidence that the money being used is actually leading to observable, empirical reductions in crime,” Schneider said. “And if that cannot be produced, then I think we need to re-evaluate the distribution of money and give it to things that we know actually do lead to reductions.”

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