Mayor to request Sheriffs help to deal with encampments
By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on April 5, 2023.
LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com
Lethbridge city council on Tuesday voted by a 6-2 motion to seek help from the Alberta Sheriffs to manage homeless encampments here.
The motion authorized mayor Blaine Hyggen to write a letter on behalf of council and the City to Public Safety and Emergency Services Minister Mike Ellis seeking that assistance on a six-month trial basis starting in May.
The motion states that in much of 2022 Lethbridge was inundated with encampments with individual camp sites giving way to a massive encampment reaching more than 90 structures in and around Civic Park. “Efforts to provide services and dismantle this encampment took months to accomplish while adjacent neighbourhoods feared for their safety,” the motion added.
The Lethbridge Police Commission is to be copied on the request letter with a request to provide input, according to the motion.
Deputy mayor John Middleton-Hope, in discussion of the motion after a question from councillor Jeff Carlson, said “this request is actually a fulsome examination of a process that the Minister of Public Safety has initiated by identifying that there are available Sheriffs to drop in to the cities of Edmonton and Calgary. Candidly, both of those initiatives have met with varying degrees of success and challenges.
Middleton-Hope said that from previous personal experiences that “Lethbridge has often been viewed as the lesser of the mid-sized or larger cities and so the scraps often do not necessarily fall from the table to the City of Lethbridge.
“It was an opportunity to say to the Minister that in fact there is a third city that experiences some significant challenges. Housing and homelessness is primarily a provincial responsibility. This is an opportunity to step up and say ‘we can do two things with this. We can assist the Lethbridge Police Service and the community of Lethbridge in bridging a period of time where they are struggling to hire new personnel to fill significant gaps.’
“The second piece is to respond to a community crisis. Who better, quite candidly, than the Sheriffs? To simply to drop them into the City of Lethbridge and ask them to go to traffic collisions and go to domestic disputes and so forth is simply not palatable. They don’t necessarily have the training, they don’t necessarily have the authority, they certainly lack the inter-operability between our systems to be able to do that,” said Middleton-Hope.
“So dropping them in and asking them to walk the beat or perform a law enforcement function in the downtown core seems to be an opportunity to squander resources. This is a request to the Minister to provide strategic resources on a strategic initiative which is to better manage encampments in the spring of 2023,” Middleton-Hope said.
Middleton-Hope said the time period provides a window of when the encampments are “the most acute in the city, so generally between April and October and it will provide us with an opportunity to examine how the deployment works, how the Sheriffs are able to work with” other other areas of the city and service providers.
“And I think then at that time we’ll be able to have a fulsome examination to determine what that looks like going forward,” said the deputy mayor.
He said he doesn’t want to encroach on Lethbridge Police Service responsibilities and abilities to perform a law enforcement function in the city.
“This is an opportunity to provide them with additional resources to get them over that bridge gap between where they are today in an under-resourced capacity to a better-resourced capacity tomorrow.”
Voting against the motion were councillors Belinda Crowson and Carlson.
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17-16
We should instruct all the tent people to go move to Carlson’s front yard.
And Crowson’s front yard and Schmidt-Rempel’s as well!
Would such things be allowed in their neighborhood?
Neudorf better strongly campaign for this if he wants to keep his job.
Too late, he is fired! People were promised change, but he is covertly putting together a Supervised Drug Consumption Site/Shelter/Resource Center by the Shelter that will take over blocks in the area, like the brick and mortar SDCS we had only supersized. This planned project has been sent to city administration for land use changes and preparation.
It will encompass several blocks and bring in people from Western Canada.
He will never be voted in again! By promising change, he deceived those who elected him! He no longer has our support and respect!
Choices made, hidden from the citizen who will not only experience increased property taxes, but increases in crime, property damage, viewing indescent acts, loss of parks use, threats and assaults.
We do not and cannot find the extra police, fire and EMS personnel that will be required from the increase of addicts in our city.
Be wary how they are quietly pushing this through without any public input!
It was frustrating sitting in Council hearing a couple of members wanting to delay this decision further, as people are just waiting to set up encampments in our city once the weather warms. These people are not the truly homeless, but the criminals we see on the streets all day and night who use the encampments as their base of operations for their criminal acts. They refuse to stay in provided shelters.
LPS has a problem recruiting, since it is hard to find suitable/eligible candidates in North America, due to the ‘defund police’ climate and tough jobs they now have to do. They now have to be social workers first and police officers second, and see many of the cases they worked hard on kicked out of court, if making it into court. There is a shortage nationwide!
We have to come up with a plan since LPS is undermanned by 21 members compared the average. We only have 6 that will be trained by fall. They have made aggressive efforts to find more recruits . . . we need a plan and the Sheriffs will only be a short term fix, if in fact there are any available now.
Right now Lethbridge taxpayers see over $14 million of their local tax dollars spent on the addiction/homeless related issues on our streets, not including tens of millions from federal and provincial funds. We have a chance to prevent our streets turning into a Vancouver DTES, similar to what has spread across BC, by stopping it before it gets out of hand.
For that we need enforcement of existing laws and need law enforcement!
Calgary has Sheriffs working along side them, embedded to assist them and LPS needs to be involved in dealing with these people because they have a rapport and knowledge of many on the streets.
The people in the encampments, from personal experience dealing directly with them are not the truly homeless . . . they can turn violent in a split second and do not respect security, bylaw officers, police or EMS if they are in this mindset. This requires trained law enforcement.
Calgary, as many other jurisdictions in Canada and North America are moving to take a tough stance on the people who have decided it is okay to commit crimes and act with anti-social behaviours.
CPS Chief states:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9598945/city-of-calgary-police-change-transit-enforcement-strategy/
“We now must address the day to day behaviors and conditions that are leading to conflict, crime and violence in our public spaces. That includes the littering, the loitering, the open drug possession, the public intoxication, the panhandling, the causing a disturbance, the types of general disorder offences that we currently see in our public spaces but wish we did not,” Neufeld said.”
We want our city back, we want our parks and neighbourhoods back, and we need true leaders we elected and hired to step up now.
This letter should have been sent several weeks ago and I applaud those responsible for bringing it forward.
We need to be PRO-ACTIVE in dealing with this or your property taxes will only increase as your city, my city is over-run.
We need a plan to augment and bolster our police ranks . . . one LPS member told me it was like drinking from a fire hose when they came to work . . . the shifts are busy and they are tired at the end . . . We need a plan!
If anyone is interested in taking back our city and preventing another Vancouver DTES from unfolding on our streets in Lethbridge, watch for ads in the Lethbridge Herald stating the time and place. The information event will be held on April 18th, between 6:30pm and 8pm and is to advise citizens what is coming and legal ways we can stop it by pressing our elected officials in acting.
There are plans of a Community Care Campus (CCC) taking up several blocks by the current shelter which will turn the area into a mega shelter/resource center that will destroy our city. The plans are taken from a Phoenix CCC, which only proved to magnify the problems and increase the numbers of homless/addicts in the Phoenix area. The video from November 2022 shows how badly it failed. Vancouver is Dying is a must to watch as well.
Watch these to videos:
Cost of Crisis: A look at conditions in ‘The Zone,’ Phoenix’s largest homeless encampment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryGyoTn_wz0&ab_channel=12News
Vancouver is Dying
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT8OU8Yhs_s&ab_channel=AaronGunn
Lets not allow Lethbridge to fall into the same abyss! We can stop it now by being PRO-ACTIVE!
Many hard working families have already lost sons and daughters as this crisis spreads . . . no one is immune . . . no part of the city . . . social stratification doesn’t matter in this case!
Get informed!
After watching both of the videos, I can’t wait to hear more and I am very concerned.
https://lethccc.com
Thank you Mr. Ewing for your real educated opinion on this matter. Soo rare!
Naive people need to rethink the harm reduction shelters idea. For a number of reasons, first of which is the number of people who turn up dead from overdoses in those facilities. A body count every 2 hours isn’t working. Can we have staff follow these people’s every minute? Perhaps with the enforcement tools that seem to be currently available no amount of staff/cops etc. can manage the situation in that setting?
One or two dimensional echo chambers need to get educated with the dirty little details they seem to be blind to. In part it maybe because they are not directly and personally affected from where they reside for housing or work locations? Or perhaps they spend more time lounging in their computer chairs rather than walking around, talking to people and opening their eyes?
In any suggestion or socalled solution it needs to be clearly pointed out where the drug dealers will be standing. Without that the solution is incomplete
With their supervised drug use site, the NDP destroyed downtown. No one has acknowledged that many businesses were destroyed and many people perished within blocks of it; one person even perished in their parking lot.
The Standoff band council has sent many of their own people to our streets, with more than 70 houses boarded up and keep on pushing their kin onto our streets, while still collecting government money for their supports and lodging.
While they continue to receive funding, we are obligated to pay for the homeless on our streets.
The Blackfoot Confederacy should be sued for the harm they have done to our city, so here’s an idea. Since they like to sue for everything, wouldn’t that be fair if we sued them? Report them to the United Nations for banishing their own kin to our streets!. A class-action lawsuit, according to someone, is already being considered.
Here’s a wacky concept: prevent them from setting up their tents/encampments to begin with. The City has had all winter to come up with a strategy.
No encampment, no issue.
Do you mean actually having some common sense to be prepared for the next year? That would be too easy!
The problem is the city has some of the old SCS staff working for City Hall and their departments, including a person that was in the executive of the SCS who is chairing an important committee that was supposed to be unbiased and represented the community’s perspective, but instead reflects the old SCS harm reduction principles that have failed in BC after 20 years of trying to make it work. The administration has been poisoned by those failed harm reduction principles. The Social Service Integration Group (SSIG) committee is useless and is a facade for the city to say we are listening, while promoting their own agenda. The SSIG is a joke!
It is forcing a proposed project on us that will encompass several blocks around the current shelter area that will not only bring more homeless/addicts to our city, but compound the issues on a major scale.
They are blindsighting many of the citizens who are not aware of this project that will bring hundreds more homeless and addicts to our community, increasing crime, loitering, encampments, further stress our strained police/fire/EMS services and increase our property taxes. No trust in this council or administration now.
How many are aware of this project? More shelter space, more detox, larger consumption site, resource center and more. Did you know?
https://lethccc.com