INNISFAIL – RCMP Staff Sgt. Ian Ihme could not have been more pleased with the local RCMP’s latest town hall meeting, despite light grumbling from media the cookie trays were late arriving.
The gregarious well-liked detachment commander is so confident with the twice-a-year event he had the more than capable Sgt. Mike Zufferli deliver the overview of policing for the town.
The evening event on July 3 at the Innisfail Royal Canadian Legion Branch #104 was a relaxed affair with about 40 citizens attending in a venue that could easily hold 250 or more.
And how do those numbers measure up against citizens’ concerns about local policing, and crime in general?
“I find when there's not a huge crowd people are generally content,” said Ihme when asked at the end of the evening’s presentations.
He later told the Albertan he would love to see up to 200 people come out but “hopefully not super angry at us.
“We do actually get more people than most detachments seem to get,” Ihme told his audience. “When I first got here we had a town hall and I think we had 70 people show up. Sylvan Lake had two.”
As far as new critically important news for the community, Ihme did give his audience an update on the status of the new Central Alberta Regional Victim Services Society, which is replacing the Innisfail and District Victim Services Society.
The audience was told frontline services well be unaffected in the town and area as there will be a full-time victim services employee that will be stationed out of the Innisfail RCMP detachment.
It’s expected the new employee will be active later this summer.
As for crime stats, the audience was told calls for service for RCMP in 2023 from within Innisfail were the lowest since at least 2018, from 2,541 in 2018 to 2,052 in 2023, a drop of almost 500.
However, the audience was also told the top three personal safety concerns uncovered in 2024 through a survey by the Innisfail Policing & Safe Community Committee were theft of personal property, property damage and trespassing, and presence of substance abuse and drug-related offences.
While there was some discussion about loud vehicles and the working relationship between Innisfail RCMP and Red Deer County peace officers, there was little if any discussion about specific crime problems in town or the rural areas.
However, one citizen did raise the issue of habitual offenders, with the audience hearing that “five per cent of the population is responsible for 95 per cent of issues.”
“We deal within the justice system that we have. The majority of the population is calling for reform but we need all aspects of our society on the same boat,” said Zufferli. “It's not an Innisfail issue, it's not an Alberta issue, it's kind of a Canadian issue, right?”
And for the Innisfail RCMP there is now high confidence in the community that while there will always be some level of crime, there is general satisfaction that local police are consistently doing a good job in keeping crime under control.
“We have an excellent detachment, excellent officers, and their visibility in the community has increased, which is such a good thing,” said Sue Haddow, a past chair of the town’s policing committee who was at the town hall on July 3. “People seem to be unhappy about what happens after police involvement, what's happening with criminals who commit crime repeatedly.
“That was brought up during the presentation but that's not a policing issue,” she added. “That is an issue with our provincial government, and we need support for the RCMP to continue.”
