Last year, in consultation with Langley City and Township representatives, RCMP leadership appointed Superintendent Adrian Marsden as the new Officer in Charge of the Langley Detachment. One of Marsden’s first orders of business was to create a new three-year strategic plan for the detachment.
Many police services and detachments do not fully involve municipal councils in developing their strategic plans, even though councils must approve their budgets, so it was refreshing that Marsden talked to every councillor in the City and Township. He was at the Langley City council meeting on Monday seeking feedback and approval of the new strategic plan.
The three-year strategic plan, “Partners for Langley’s Future,” has four goals.
Calibrate our visibility to maintain a sense of safety in Langley neighbourhoods & public spaces
Collaborate with partners to support persons experiencing homelessness and mental health issues
Plan with cross-jurisdictional public safety partners
Strengthen our capacity to respond to Langley’s growth and diversity
While the strategic plan is for three years, it only contains a year’s worth of specific tasks within these four main goals. The plan’s approach is to complete the tasks and measure if they have succeeded in meeting the goals. Based on the measures of success, the tasks will be adjusted as needed.
For example, for the goal of maintaining a sense of safety in Langley neighbourhoods & public spaces, the measure of success are the hours of proactive patrol time, hours of foot and bike patrol, reductions in calls for service for disorder, and an increase in citizen-reported sense of safety.
One of the tasks for this year is to “allocate at least 500 hours of bike patrol in Langley’s public spaces during the spring and summer months and weekday foot patrols in Downtown throughout remainder of the year.”
Another task for this year is to “double [the] size of [the] Mental Health Unit, trained to respond to calls involving persons with mental health challenges.”
With the arrival of SkyTrain in the coming years, a task for this year will be to co-locate two transit police officers within the Langley detachment.
I only posted a sample of the tasks within the new strategic plan. I encourage you to view the easy-to-read strategic plan.
Council supported the strategic plan.
1 comment:
Just in the past week I've seen people openly dealing and using drugs on the one way in a little nook next to the thrift store across from salt lane, and a bike chop shop set up under tarps in the parking lot of samba sushi. In both instances while I was watching it happen an RCMP SUV drove by, looked at them, and kept driving.
I went for a walk yesterday and there was someone selling drugs on the corner of 204th and 54th, (Something that's not rare as from what I hear brighton apartments has more than a few issues with things like that.), only a block away from the detachment on douglas.
To be blunt, unless the RCMP's new strategy is to hire police who will actually do their jobs and police the community, then announcements like this just come off as them trying to look busy rather than actually do something.
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