Four or five months ago, rural Albertans were crying out for relief from what they perceived to be a massive increase in crime.’
Some were even comparing rural Alberta to the “wild west” of old, and you began to hear rural property-owners cry out for the right to shoot intruders on their property.
Back in April, about two dozen people attended a meeting hosted by the County of Barrhead to brainstorm ideas around tackling the perceived increase in rural crime.
Similar meetings were being held in nearby communities, and the United Conservative Party was ringing the alarm bells as hard as it could, insisting that further steps could be taken to combat the epidemic.
Now it’s September, and you barely hear a peep about crime. Nobody seems particularly invested in taking extra steps to address it, despite crying out for a saviour only a season ago.
So what happened? It’s simple: crime followed the usual rollercoaster of ebbs and flows. It was high earlier this year and now it’s not.
That’s not to say we were all participants in some kind of mass delusion. Crime did spike. Statistics Canada recently released data that showed the crime rate in 2017 spiked about 3.6 per cent here in Alberta, with rural areas being particularly hard hit.
In fact, Alberta’s rural crime rate was 38 per cent higher than the urban crime rate, the only province where that was the case.
As well, violent crimes like assault and homicide were on the rise, though here in the rural areas, the major increase was in property crime.
Fast forward a year, and it seems the tables have turned, An article published in the Sept. 11 edition of the Town & Country suggests that crime rates have decreased by 25 per cent, with over 650 fewer motor vehicle thefts, 366 fewer break-in and 2,300 fewer instances of property theft compared to the previous year.
Although we weren’t able to check with the Barrhead RCMP to see if that drop was reflected in the local area, Westlock’s staff sergeant said there had been a drop in property crimes, and what happens in the Westlock area is likely going to be reflected in the Barrhead area.
The RCMP was the first to claim that their program of targeted arrests spurred the decrease in crime. The NDP chimed in to highlight the $10 million they kicked in for the Rural Crime Reduction Program.
There’s no doubt those things helped, but it’s more likely that better economic conditions was the main reason crime rates began to plummet.
What’s to be learned from all this? From a pure crime perspective, we need to remember that it is influenced by societal trends, which rise and fall with continued regularity.
But more importantly, we need to learn how to recognize when someone is telling us that the wolves are in the pasture. They might have been briefly, but even wolves have to sleep sometime.
