Three shootings walking trail sexual assault a stabbing-death murder.
Those were some of the headlines that prompted a furor in the city of North Battleford over the issue of crime in 2013 - an issue that prompted public town hall meetings, discussion in council chambers and the legislature, and even national news attention in 2013.
One is tempted to call 2013 the Year of Fear in the Battlefords, given some of the crimes and indeed, the wave of rumours and rumour mongering that flourished. But may others in the community claim they were never afraid at all and that it was all blown out of proportion. Whatever the feelings, no one can deny that the crime issue dominated discussion, at least, in North Battleford this past year.
The crime issue, of course, is not a new one. North Battleford topped the national crime severity index for three years in a row going into 2013, and some efforts such as the HUB initiative entered their first full year of operation this past year.
Widespread property crime and vandalism have been ongoing concerns for years and there was more of that this year, with a string of break-ins at area schools causing much grief to residents.
That resulted in charges against eight youths and a number of arrests, including children as young as age 12. RCMP Sgt. Kurt Grabinsky told city council in July there had been 29 separate school break-in incidents.
The rash of school break-ins concerned and upset people, but the rash of shooting incidents shocked and alarmed them.
The first incident was on May 25 at a residence on the 1700 block of 104th Street in an apparent drive-by shooting. RCMP reported that "based on preliminary information, the suspect or suspects drove up to the scene in a vehicle, fired several rounds at the residence or the victim, and then fled the scene in the same vehicle. Police report the victim is from the North Battleford area, but did not reside at that location of the incident."
The incident prompted concern from local residents about whether or not it might be a random act.
When asked about it by Councillor Ryan Bater in City Hall, RCMP detachment commander, Staff-Sgt. Phil Wilson, said "I would suggest it is not a random act, it wouldn't be considered a random act. It is an act of violence involving people who have a particular lifestyle."
When asked by Bater if there was a danger of this being repeated, Wilson responded "there's no way to predict that. I wish I could say no, but I'm not going to predict that."
In late July, word came from Statistics Canada that North Battleford topped the national Crime Severity Index for a fourth year in a row.
That news prompted local outrage about the level of crime in the city, while others expressed their concern about the hit to the city's image. The latter issue came up at North Battleford city council when councillors bemoaned an Aug. 17 front page Saskatoon StarPhoenix account of North Battleford's crime problems.
Councillor Greg Lightfoot said clients from Calgary had sent him about 20 emails about the article and said, "we are really getting labeled with a bad brush."
It was also revealed during that same meeting that Councillor Trent Houk had been hit 10 times during a recent wave of vehicle break-ins. That, as well as the news reports on the crime severity numbers, outraged fellow Councillor Ryan Bater.
"Everyone here agrees, we all get very angry when we hear about these reports," said Bater. "We get very angry when we hear about our friends and loved ones, like my colleague across the floor being robbed 10 times this summer. We all want something to happen. It's very frustrating."
Unfortunately, incidents continued to happen both within and outside the Battlefords during the summer months.
One incident that made headlines was a 90-minute police chase that extended through a large portion of the Northwest region July 30. The chase went through grid roads, across fields and on rural sections of highways 21, 771 and 31; the accused even drove through the Macklin golf course at one point before he was arrested.
Another alarming incident happened Aug. 17 on 110th Street. It was there Christopher Passley, contracted at the time for work with Concern for Youth, was arrested and charged with assault causing bodily harm on the woman he was living with.
He was released on conditions in September, but soon after Passley removed his electronic monitoring bracelet and went missing, prompting the victim to take to social media to seek his capture.
The accused was finally arrested in Calgary in early October. Passley was eventually sentenced to two years less a day, plus probation, in connection to the various charges.
The most shocking incident yet came on Sept. 1 when North Battleford was rocked by the second drive-by shooting.
That incident happened in the morning in the vicinity of Diefenbaker Drive and St. Laurent Drive in the city. According to the RCMP and the facts that were later outlined by the Crown in court, three individuals driving in a vehicle that morning got into an argument with passersby, with one of them opening fire on one of them with a sawed-off rifle.
The victim wound up in hospital with a gunshot wound, and three individuals were arrested as a result, with one youth convicted of being an accessory after the fact. The case remains in the courts for the other two accused individuals. All three are alleged to be members of the Terror Squad street gang.
That incident shocked the community, causing fear that escalated just a week later when various messages went out on Facebook and other social media about rumours of "gang initiations" in the community that involved firearms and possibly targeted random individuals. RCMP sergeant Neil Tremblay later told a meeting of the Battlefords Chamber of Commerce that police had to spend 40 to 50 man hours just to follow up on that rumour - one of several unfounded rumours the force had to contend with during the summer and fall.
City Manager Jim Toye told a city meeting the following Monday that the gang-shootings rumour was "an attempt at sensationalism." Still, it was enough to prompt yet more negative media attention on North Battleford, as CTV News set up a camera crew at Walmart and interviewed local residents frightened by the rumour.
An "angry" Councillor Ryan Bater singled out CTV for criticism, saying the story "painted another negative blight on our city."
Yet just a week after the gang-initiation rumours came another shooting of an individual, this time on Sept. 16 on St. Laurent Drive.
That third shooting of 2013 was enough to prompt City officials to schedule a public information session for Sept. 30 to address public safety concerns, as well as move to set up a Neighbourhood Watch.
The timing of that public meeting would prove to be especially unfortunate. Fears of local residents were heightened after word came of the arrest of Chad Weasel, who would later plead guilty to sexual assault after he approached and allegedly grabbed two women in separate incidents on the North Battleford walking trail along Territorial Drive on the evening of Sept. 28.
Then Sept. 30 residents woke up to the shocking news that a man had been stabbed to death at a downtown North Battleford hotel around 4 a.m.
A leading member of the Terror Squad gang, Nicholas Giroux, was later charged with the second-degree murder of Thang Sian Mang, age 20.
The shocking murder, which acting detachment commander Sgt. Darcy Woolfitt told council was the first one in a decade in the city of North Battleford, set the tone for a tense and confrontation public meeting at the Don Ross Centre.
What was meant to be an informational meeting descended quickly into a gripe session, as Mayor Ian Hamilton and several leading members of the RCMP were bombarded with complaints from residents unhappy about the crime situation.
Around the same time, the crime concerns resulted in an explosion of interest in the Facebook group North Battleford Victims of Crime, devoted to providing information about crime instances in the city.
The site's founder, Guy Turcotte, saw membership quadruple past the 1,000 mark, and Turcotte himself became a vocal advocate for more resources to fight crime and for more transparency from city officials on the crime situation.
The Sept. 30 public meeting capped what was a difficult time for the Battlefords RCMP detachment, who were hearing mounting frustration from upset residents about the crime situation.
Earlier that month, Sgt. Kurt Grabinsky told council the "community has been expressing a lot of frustration through August as well as September with the crime statistics severity index, as well as the overall crime that has been happening in the community."
The meeting at Don Ross Centre Sept. 30 was followed up by additional meetings, including an organizational meeting to launch Neighbourhood on Oct. 23, as well as another public meeting organized by Steven Cormons of the Good Neighbour Network on Nov. 8.
Both meetings attracted noticeably fewer people than the Sept. 30 meeting, but there was a sizable increase in interest expressed from one segment - the news media.
In fact, the media's unrelenting focus on the crime woes of North Battleford became as much of a story as the crime instances that had actually gone on.
Television cameras were in abundance at the Nov. 8 meeting at the Knights of Columbus Hall, as well as the Oct. 23 Neighbourhood Watch meeting. Among those there was correspondent Jill Macyshon from CTV National News.
Her story on crime in North Battleford ran the following night to a nationwide audience. CTV News anchor Lisa LaFlamme introduced the piece by declaring North Battleford to be "Canada's Crime Capital. Population 14,000."
Reaction to the piece was deeply divided in the North Battleford community. Many praised the piece as a realistic portrayal of the city's problems with drugs, guns and gangs.
On the opposite side, others were alarmed by the portrayal of a city gripped by crime, and upset at the continual media pounding the city was taking.
That sentiment was expressed by Chamber of Commerce director Warren Williams, who posed a question on the topic of the negative media coverage to former national news anchor Richard Brown at the Best Business Showcase held that same week.
Williams asked Brown how the city could get a more balanced approach from the media. Part of Brown's response was to encourage people to "look for the success stories in the community and focus on them, whether the success stories are about young people finding ways to get together to head off crime, whether it is an anti-bullying story, whether it is stories about having communities coming together, because it's easy for reporters to find the bad news. What you have to do is hand them the good news."
When he spoke to the News-Optimist/Regional Optimist, Brown elaborated on his thoughts further "I think we have to be careful on how we report on crime. You can make statistics say just about anything," he said.
"There's growing pains in North Battleford," said Brown. "And when you have young, journalists reporting on a story as deep and as wide as crime, then they need to take even more responsibility when they report on the story to make sure that they're getting it right and they're not trying to slant the story one way or the other. Because that's the problem. You can look at crime numbers and you can say 'oh my God.' You know, 'everybody in North Battleford is a criminal, or a victim.' And it's just not true."
Still, the news reports depicting North Battleford as a place where people were afraid to walk down the streets were having an impact.
That, as well as the rumours and the fear-mongering on social media, prompted the Battlefords RCMP to go ahead with an unusual move of their own. They started up an information campaign in the fall as a first-of-its-kind pilot project.
Their aim: to get people informed on those crime instances that were actually occurring in the city on a daily basis. The detachment started releasing "daily reports" which included not only some serious situations, but also the routine, mundane, and even just plain dumb incidents RCMP members have to respond to on a regular basis.
Sgt. Neil Tremblay would later tell the Battlefords Chamber of Commerce in December that the goal was to "put the public at ease. There was a lot of misinformation, a lot of conjecture, a lot of exaggerated beliefs out there in terms of the things going on in the community. And we thought this probably would help to alleviate that."
But in addition to those daily reports were more details about crime instances in the city. Numbers for the previous five years were released in November, showing the situation was much worse in the city back in 2010 and 2011 than it is now.
"Total criminal code offences for the first 10 months of 2013 are at 5,118, compared to 5,094 for the same period in 2012, 5,438 in 2011, 5,277 in 2010 and 4,834 in 2009," reported the News-Optimist/Regional Optimist Nov.20.
When Sgt. Darcy Woolfitt went before council in October to present the RCMP detachment's monthly statistics report, he provided third-quarter crime numbers for the period July-through-September, which compared the 2013 numbers to 2012 and 2011.
Woolfitt reported that for the third quarter "in almost all of the categories except for provincial traffic enforcement, we showed a decrease in all areas with the exception of residential break and enters, where we've got a slight increase in that area."
That statistical report, which showed declining overall crime instances in September despite the high-profile shooting and stabbing incidents that same month, prompted the News-Optimist/Regional Optimist to lead its story on Oct. 29 with the words "crime wave? What crime wave?"
RCMP representatives later confirmed to the Battlefords Chamber of Commerce that much of what had been reported about North Battleford's crime problems was a bit overblown.
"This great large crime wave that everyone's talked about doesn't exist," Tremblay told the Chamber board Dec. 10.
"I think that message is finally, slowly, slowly getting through. And even just the presence of our daily reports, they're seeing what we're dealing with. We're not dealing with mad gangs tackling people down main street on a daily basis. We're dealing with a lot of the same element that any city will deal with."
The combination of more daily reports, and the release of more statistics was welcomed by the public, whose reaction to the work of RCMP officers had notably changed by the end of the year. By and large, the comments were now largely favourable to the work they were doing.
Councillor Ryan Bater, who is the city's representative on the Chamber board, noted the change in the public mood at that meeting. It had shifted from a tone of "why isn't anybody doing anything?" to empathy over what police have to deal with on a daily basis.
The focus now of city officials is figuring out what can and should be done to bolster their efforts towards fighting the criminal activity going on in the city.
On Oct. 15, a motion by Bater requesting a joint meeting of city council with the minister of public safety (Canada) and minister of justice (Saskatchewan) to discuss an action plan to address public safety in the city of North Battleford, passed unanimously.
Meetings were held in Regina in early November between Mayor Ian Hamilton and City Manager Jim Toye and provincial corrections and policing minister Christine Tell and provincial minister of justice Gordon Wyant. Toye told reporters the City specifically asked for funding for more police officers and also "community service" officers, as well as funding towards the HUB - the multi-agency community mobilization initiative on public safety that had celebrated one year of operation.
There were plans afoot for further meetings between the City and province by the end of the year as well as ongoing efforts towards a meeting with the federal government as well. The issue of public safety in North Battleford was also raised in the Legislature, with NDP opposition critic John Nilson demanding action from Tell on the issue during Question Period in November.
In the end, it seemed like the talk about crime in the Battlefords was overshadowing the crime that was actually going on by the end of the year, as the incidents of violence noticeably slowed down.
What kind of response will come from upper levels of government to North Battleford's public safety needs will be an issue to watch in early 2014. In speaking to reporters Nov.12, just days after the initial round of meetings with provincial officials, Toye seemed optimistic that the concerns will be addressed, at least at the provincial level.
"They certainly understand some issues going on in North Battleford," said Toye, who wraps up duties as city manager Dec. 31 before moving to Prince Albert.
"They want to make sure they understand the root of the problem prior to sending a lot of resources to the city of North Battleford. But we had heard some very positive things from the ministers. We are on their radar screen. They know what's going on in North Battleford, they care about North Battleford."
