Saskatoon — As outlined in last month's throne speech, the Saskatchewan Party government is moving ahead with a plan to create a new policing unit focused on warrant enforcement and "high-profile" offenders.
Based in Saskatoon and Meadow Lake, the province said the team will work with RCMP and local police services using GPS and monitoring devices to crack down on serious rural crime, which minister of corrections, justice, and public safety Christine Tell said is increasing.
"We've met with communities and the local RCMP in various areas throughout the province, and what we're finding is that very prolific or people who reoffend, are in the communities with outstanding criminal code warrants," Tell said.
- Premier Scott Moe: 'Saskatchewan needs to be a nation within a nation'
The province said electronic monitoring systems combined with GPS will allow police to monitor offenders, track and record their location and movements throughout the day to be able to identify if they’ve violated geographical conditions of their release.
"If it means that they're in the community and being safely monitored, rather than behind bars, or rather than not being monitored when they should be, we certainly understand how there could be some public benefits of that," said Pierre Hawkins, public legal counsel for John Howard Society.
Hawkins said he’d like to see more resources put into preventative measures rather than enforcement.
"I think what we've seen in the last few years is a shift in kind of the public imagination to say, not necessarily that we need less police, but that we could certainly save resources on the policing side if we invest more in the community," he said.
"That means gang-exit programs, that means addictions treatment, that means mental health treatment, all of which have a significant bearing on the crime rate and on public safety."
NDP justice critic Nicole Sarauer said the province is not really addressing the symptoms behind crime.
"You hear from from those who work on the frontline, from officers in particular, that a lot of this crime is the result of addictions issues," she said."If this province would do a better job of addressing the crisis around addiction to crystal meth and addiction to fentanyl, I think we would see a much more significant reduction in crime than simply reallocating police officers under a new acronym."
Minister Tell said the province's gang-reduction strategies and programs within correctional facilities that address addictions issues have been very successful.
"We're expanding that particular addictions programming throughout all of our facilities ... and the gang reduction strategy is having great success," she said.
"Keeping people out of gangs or extricating them from gangs and providing that support that is required going forward, gangs, addictions; if the supports aren’t there, they'll go back to them."
Hawkins said there’s a "spotty history" in Saskatchewan of imposing release conditions that set people up to fail, and he’s concerned this new task force will start focusing on people who have been set up to fail.
"We want to make sure that, that is not being used as an excuse to harass those people and prevent them from getting on with rehabilitation, getting on with their lives," Hawkins said.
In a news release the province said it will invest $370,000 into the team in 2021-22, and $1.6 million each subsequent fiscal year, while the electronic monitoring GPS initiative will receive $673,000 in 2021-22 and will have an ongoing annual cost of $1.3 million in each subsequent year.
Sarauer said we won’t know if it’s money well spent until numbers from the taskforce are available.
"We have a huge problem with remand, with over 50 per cent of the individuals incarcerated right now have not been convicted of a crime, they're currently on remand," she said. "If this will address that while keeping our community safe then that's important and that's good, but we won't know until you see the outcomes of the new announcements."
Tell said she anticipates it will be worth it.
"There are people that perhaps would not be in remand if we had GPS."
