Nicole Perry December 6, 2023
The community of Kamloops collectively feels less safe by the day as concerns for crime and homelessness rise.
While the City does what’s in its jurisdiction to address complaints from residents, city councillor Dale Bass, Safety and Security Select Committee member, said people blame the homeless population for feeling unsafe, making assumptions that they’re criminals. “There’s this whole populist attitude that they’re not us.”
“This is what drives us as a select committee,” Bass said. “We try to make decisions or work with our staff to find ways to implement policies, procedures, processes that, that work to mitigate this, this ongoing belief by a lot of people.”
In a 2022 Citizen Satisfaction Survey Report, residents were asked to point out concerns that they felt led to the perceived decrease in quality of life in Kamloops. Homelessness/poverty was pointed to by 46 per cent of residents and 45 per cent identified an increase in crime. Only one in 10 respondents feel safer compared to three years ago, with eight in 10 saying the community has become less safe in this time.
The community consensus has guided some of the select committee’s decisions. Bass said last term City Council approved 25 more police because people kept saying the city was unsafe and more policing was needed.
“Five a year for five years,” she said, highlighting the plan. “Here’s the problem. There weren’t anybody, there was nobody going into the depot to become an RCMP officer.”
The 2023 Kamloops point-in-time report during April 12 to 13 of 2023 identified 312 people experiencing homelessness. This number has risen by over one hundred in the last two years and increased 228 per cent over the last nine years.
“If every single homeless person was a violent person, a criminal, we would have a horrible situation because there’s like 400 of them out there,” Bass said.
One of the top priorities for the Kamloops RCMP is crimes against persons. Their third quarter (Q3) report to the city said this has resulted in “a reduction of 36% of robbery offences, 20% for assaults and 10% for assault with a weapon or cause bodily harm offences.”
Property offence statistics have gone down as well, in all areas except for breaking and entering businesses, which has increased by 27 per cent. However, B&E into residences has gone down 53 per cent and unspecified/other B&Es have decreased 33 per cent.
Councillors such as Bass get complaints from everyone because, as she said, they’ll respond. Community Service Officers have buzzing call lines. Bass said, “CSOs have to prioritize the calls, and there are way more calls than there are CSOs.”
She read an email from the influx in her inbox that accumulated since sitting down 25 minutes prior. “Someone is camped out in front of our business. We called the city. We didn’t get a call back. We called again.”
They get a lot of calls and emails like this, she said. “We cannot interfere or assist an individual business. And business people don’t seem to like it, the fact that when we say to them, well, it’s your problem.”
Bass has heard people say they won’t go downtown or let their wife go downtown because “There are homeless people there. And they could be criminals.”
She said, “I’ve actually had someone say they gave up their rights when they went on the street.”
There are notable reasons identified in the point-in-time report why some experiencing homelessness may not want to access shelter. In these findings, 18 per cent of survey respondents reported not feeling safe.
“We can’t force people who live on the riverbank to not live on the riverbank,” Bass said, because there’s not enough shelter for everyone. “You can designate the area where they can camp, but you can’t say you can’t camp”
“The commonality of issues that the police are seeing and what we’re hearing helps inform what steps we take, what decisions we make, and where we want to put our attention,” Bass said. “So for example, we asked all the neighborhood associations to encourage the residents to start reporting every crime they experienced.”
She said they were then able to inform the police on what areas may need more focus. At the time, she said, car thefts were prevalent. This year’s quarter two report from the RCMP showed a 72 per cent decrease in stolen vehicles and a 28 per cent decrease in theft from vehicles.
“There’s a big group of people out there who aren’t, who do not feel safe,” Bass said. “But who aren’t going to come out now to find out why they don’t feel safe and what we’re doing to try to help them.”