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In just over a month, Saskatoon’s Fairhaven neighbourhood could be under the watchful eyes of trained volunteer patrols.
The Fairhaven Resident’s Patrol is a pilot project that Ward 3 councillor Robert Pearce said will last between six to 12 months.
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Crime in the community is an issue the councillor has been vocal about in the last few years since the Emergency Wellness Centre opened.
With it, volunteers will go out to observe and report on what’s happening in the community to the Saskatoon Police Service (SPS), providing the force with real time information. That could include notifying SPS of things like vandalized fences, graffiti, or someone sleeping under a tree, according to Pearce.
“We’re able to highlight areas that might be of concern to police, that they are unaware of, that they need to check more often, because this is done in conjunction with police,” Pearce said.
For the most part, volunteers will do the patrolling in their cars, but he said there might also be larger groups walking through parks.
Pearce assured, however, that it’s not a vigilante group.
“We are not going out to beat up people or anything like that stretch of the imagination. It is literally just a way for people to help take back their community,” he said.
While people in the neighbourhood were informally doing patrols already, according to Pearce it wasn’t enough.
“What we found is that we need more people,” he said.
“The reality of it is a lot of the people who want to cause issues generally don’t want to be seen. So, the more they know people are around who are observing and reporting, the less likely they’re going to want to be in those areas.”
Pearce said the project will be run by a board of four people, although he’s not one of them.
Reporting system via app
Volunteers will log their reports to police through a reporting app called ACOPA.
According to Pearce it’s already being used in B.C., Alberta, and North Battleford.
“When you start your patrol you just open the app, you hit ‘start patrol,’ and then it follows you. It ties into your GPS, so it follows you where you’re going,” he said.
Once their patrol’s finished, volunteers will hit stop in the app, triggering a PDF report that’s sent directly to police.
“Our hope is our statistical issues with crime are going to be better reported,” Pearce said.
For the time being, he said SPS will need to manually enter the information gleaned from ACOPA’s reports because automatically putting that data into the system would be a, “huge investment.”
Group targets starting in May
There was a meeting at the Confederation Inn on March 18 to share information about the Fairhaven Resident’s Patrol.
Pearce said roughly 35 people came out for the meeting, although he doesn’t know how many have signed up.
While the only hard requirement is that all volunteers must go through a criminal record check, for Pearce, they’ll also ideally live in the Fairhaven community.
The plan, according to Pearce, is to have volunteers undergo a three-hour Saturday morning training session in early May, which will be led by the SPS and Saskatchewan Citizens on Patrol Association (SCOPA).
Once it’s finalized, though, the group will be a member of SCOPA, which Pearce said has extra insurance coverage for trained volunteers.
After it’s up and running, the goal is for there to be daily patrols in Fairhaven.
— with files from 650 CKOM’s Lara Fominoff
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