RCMP Watch

Andrea Sands, The Edmonton Journal

Alberta municipal police forces are far less satisfied with their Mountie partners than are police in other provinces, an RCMP survey suggests.

Alberta communities where Mounties work on a contract basis are also lukewarm about whether the police force meets local needs.

In the 2006 Performance Management Surveys of Canadian police forces that work with Mounties, 77 per cent expressed satisfaction with the RCMP’s “contribution to ensuring safe homes and safe communities.”

In Alberta, just 33 per cent of policing partners responding to the 2004 survey were satisfied. In 2003 the figure was 21 per cent.

No survey results from Mounties’ police partners in Alberta were available for this year or 2005 because too few people responded. There were six respondents in 2004 and 15 in 2003,

according to the survey posted last week on the RCMP’s national website.

In 2004, just 33 per cent of Alberta police partners thought the RCMP demonstrated professionalism in their work. Nationally, the number was 90 per cent.

The numbers are telling, said Staff Sgt. Peter Ratcliff, president of the Edmonton Police Association and the Alberta Federation of Police Associations.

“It is a very, very large organization run out of Ottawa,” Ratcliff said.

“It does take a significant amount of time to get a lot of things done. Sometimes one size doesn’t fit all.”

Although RCMP officers “work themselves ragged,” they are chronically understaffed and underfunded and the organization itself is bureaucratic and cumbersome, Ratcliff said.

“They rely far more on us than we do on them in terms of resources and assistance,” Ratcliff said. “If there’s not enough resources, it certainly causes some friction and tensions, that’s for sure.”

Edmonton Police Service spokesman Jeff Wuite said police here work closely with Mounties through several joint-forces teams: Project Kare, which is investigating the murders of Edmonton sex-trade workers; the Green Team, which sniffs out marijuana grow operations; the Internet Child Exploitation team and the Integrated Response to Organized Crime. Those are all highly successful partnerships, Wuite said.

Among the Alberta communities where Mounties police on a contract basis, survey numbers show greater overall satisfaction with RCMP service, but generally poor scores when it comes to meeting local needs.

This year, just 56 per cent of respondents believed the RCMP was sufficiently involved in setting local policing priorities and developing and implementing community plans; 55 per cent said the RCMP represent good value for money; and 45 per cent said the RCMP effectively deploy resources.

Insp. Tim Vatamaniuk, client-services officer with Alberta’s RCMP K-Division, said Mounties are rolling out a new “detachment performance plan” this month that should tackle many of the community concerns.

“That means each detachment commander will meet with their municipal representatives and develop a policing plan together,” Vatamaniuk said Saturday.

“They will identify the priorities together, they will identify the measures and what they want to achieve and together they will identify the steps that are going to be taken. Both the police and the community will have to sign off on that,” he said.

“We do take those surveys quite seriously and we recognized that some of our contract partners were not pleased with the RCMP meeting their priorities at the local level.”

There are about 105 rural RCMP detachments in Alberta funded by the province through a federal-government contract, Vatamaniuk said. Another 41 municipalities in Alberta have their own contracts for RCMP service, he said.

asands@thejournal.canwest.com

SURVEY SAYS

More results from the RCMP survey of policing partners:

- Percentage who agreed the RCMP is an organization with integrity and honesty: 50 per cent in Alberta, 88 per cent in all of Canada.

- Percentage who agreed the organization effectively communicates what it is doing and why: 33 per cent in Alberta, 49 per cent in Canada.

- Percentage who agreed RCMP information and intelligence were accurate: 25 per cent in Alberta, 71 per cent in Canada.

- Percentage who agreed the organization places emphasis on providing good service: 17 per cent in Alberta, 76 per cent in Canada.

- Percentage who agreed the RCMP provides timely and appropriate responses: 17 per cent in Alberta, 64 per cent in Canada.

(Alberta figures are based on a survey of six respondents in 2004; Canada figures are based on a survey of 160 respondents in 2006. Most of those surveyed were chiefs of police for municipal forces.)
© The Edmonton Journal