At the latest Board of Police Commissioners meeting, the Estevan Police Service Presented some of their statistics for activity in January.
Their Crime Statistics Report covered a number of areas, including crimes against persons, crimes against property, and more.
EPS Chief Jamie Blunden talks about some areas that saw improvements.
"Not a lot of stuff that's jumping out, there's a dramatic decrease for violations for crimes against persons. That's dropped down considerably by 39 per cent. Crimes against property were down about 47 per cent from January of 2024 to January 2025 and again when we look at the Criminal Code violations, we're down as well."
A few areas did see upticks, but Blunden says looking at the five-year average rather than percentages is more appropriate for those.
"There's three areas that we look at and go okay, we're going to keep an eye on them. Self-caused bodily harm, for the five-year average you're up it says 200 per cent, but that's going from one for the five-year average to three. Then sex crimes, we go from 2.2 to 3, so we're we're higher than the five-year average overall. When we look at it on a monthly basis, we're doing pretty good, but the five-year average is a better indication of where we're at."
"And then, the theft under $5,000, 8.4 was the five-year average and we're at actually 11."
For the items that pop up, EPS strives to look for any reasons behind the pop-up and if any specific action needs to be taken.
Blunden gives an example from the thefts under $5,000, which when looked into, seems to be different cases rather than one solid issue.
"We look at as, is there any story, pattern, that we got to look at in total. But not really, because at the end of the da,y I'll sort of list and you'll have an idea what's happened in January. We've had theft of power. So there's a vehicle, that was plugged into a house that wasn't their house, so they were taking the power. That's one, a couple of reports of thefts from the liquor store."
"We have one gas drive-off, the person was located and brought back. There's no charge, but it still registers as theft. Theft from a grocery store and we had one theft of motor vehicle and then there's a couple of thefts of shoplifting from Walmart."
"So it's a wide variety of things. Not one particular pattern where we say, OK, we've got an issue coming on, an emerging crime scene that we got to get on."