Last night's Board of Police Commissioners meeting in Estevan had the assembled civilians and EPS members discussing some of the latest figures to come from the city's police force.
Overall, December 2024 saw slightly more calls for service than December 2023, with 560 calls compared to 532. The total calls for year-to-date actually showed a decrease, with 2024 seeing 7,423 calls and 2023 seeing 7,946, a drop of 6.6 per cent.
Estevan Police Chief Jamie Blunden says that while overall the year has been average there are a couple of items he's focusing on, starting with Crimes Against Person.
"When we look at crimes against persons. We talked about this before in the past about sexual crimes. It's up 16 percent, 32 to 37, not a big jump. It's only 5, but a lot of those increases are related back to the online platforms, the sextortion sort of thing with the teenagers and stuff in school. So that's one of the biggest things that we identified there."
"The assaults, slightly up 110 to 121. That's not a big change overall for a year to date. You know, there's a few extras in that 11 overall and really no rhyme or reason. So nothing really to report on that to do."
"When we look at the overall it's 13% up from 154 to 174 and not a lot of stuff going on there, a little bit more education maybe on this sextortion and online platforms at the schools. Hence this whole program that we want to introduce this year, we probably go along really good with that sort of line."
Moving on to Crimes Against Property, Blunden says they're taking a big look at motor vehicle thefts.
"The biggest two things that I take away from this and we've looked at, both the deputy and I, are theft of motor vehicle is up 86% from 14 to 26 year to date. You look at the years that are sort of the month of December to December, they're even so December wasn't an issue, it's sort of year to date."
"So that being increase of 86%, we look at that, there's a lot of take auto without owners permission, we talked about this at previous meetings, that's the biggest driver in those numbers that are up, there's more of those than there was the previous years."
"Then, of course, the theft under $5,000, those are only up 18% from 197 to 233. Most of those minor offences that are nuisance offences, but if you're the one that's the victim of it, it's not a nuisance offence. So we look at things like your backshed that's open and somebody walks in and somebody comes and takes that lawn mower, and then they go and pawn for 20 bucks so they can get their next hit."
Blunden says that a possible method of curtailing these "nuisance offences" could be increased visibility with more patrols to deter theft.
Some good news was seen in the Criminal Code Traffic Violations section with a solid 27 per cent drop in impaired offences.
"All the education pieces and all our high vis and all our proactive policing with respect to drinking and driving has worked. One thing that we got to talk about, though, is the impaired by drugs, that's up slightly, 13 percent, 23 to 26. It's only three and you know, keeping in mind, if you look at a five-year value, five years ago, we probably weren't arresting as many people for drugs, and now we have all the technology and we've increased that so much more."
Blunden says he'd look to continue doing educational pieces to get the drug use down and keep impaired driving falling.
Looking back at 2024, Blunden says he's positive about the year and he feels that the EPS made solid strides.
"Overall I thought it was a very good year. I think there's a few areas that we could sort of look at and go, 'hey, you know, keep in mind that this is here and then we'll work on it', but compared to last year, with all some of the major issues that happened, I think we're in a pretty good position."