INNISFAIL - Based on the results of the 2025 Community Safety & Well-Being Survey, the Town of Innisfail's council has approved the 2025 policing priorities for the community.
At council’s regular meeting on March 24 Innisfail RCMP Staff Sgt. Ian Ihme, the detachment’s commanding officer, presented a report outlining the findings of this year’s survey and it showed the top three priorities from citizens were police/community relations – visibility of police, crime reduction – property and drug crime and traffic safety.
The Innisfail Community Safety Survey is conducted by the Town of Innisfail on behalf of the Innisfail Policing & Safe Community Committee, which was founded in 2019.
The policing priorities chosen for 2025 are identical to the ones chosen by local citizens in the 2024 survey.
Town council unanimously approved a motion to go forward on the three policing priorities chosen for the community in 2025.
“One of the big overarching themes is that people just wanted to see the police more,” Ihme said during his presentation. “They wanted to see more patrols. They wanted to see more patrols at night. They wanted us at more events at the schools.
“Between visibility, crime reduction and traffic safety, those are the three main themes that shone through the survey, and they're probably the three things I hear about the most,” added Ihme. “In discussion it with the policing committee, they were in agreement the priorities as we had for last year should remain the same for this year, and there were no real other priorities that were brought forward from the committee.”
Ihme reminded council that this year’s survey ran for six weeks this winter from January to March.
The survey attracted 167 community members who responded to 40 questions.
“There was less engagement than there was last year, probably about slightly half,” said Ihme. “We discussed that at the meeting, and there’s possibly a little bit of survey fatigue, not just from the town, but just in general (as) everybody's doing a survey for everything."
Ihme told council his detachment members are experiencing good engagement from the community on initiatives the RCMP is currently doing and would like to see “more of the things we were doing.”
He noted over the past year detachment members have attended well over 100 community events, including town hall meetings.
“Not all of these apply to the town, some of them to the rural community with rural school visits,” said Ihme, adding there is a full-time school resource officer at the Innisfail Schools Campus. “He is only used within the town of Innisfail, and so I've assigned on a part-time basis, some of my other officers to do a little bit of school presence at the rural schools.”
Ihme said the detachment’s foot patrol initiative over the past few years has been well received, and that will continue along with dedicated proactive patrols in the rural community and in town.
Council was also told the Innisfail RCMP is increasing its online communication through a new Facebook page called Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta (Innisfail RCMP Detachment).
“Our proposal is to do increased amount of online communication, just showing what we're doing,” said Ihme.
Ihme told council members his detachment also initiated targeted enforcement of people with warrants, a successful project that was conducted last month and will continue next year.
He said his detachment is also committed to having traffic safety initiatives for the upcoming year.
“Those are staying the same with high visibility traffic operations in town here and in the county, and then with provincial traffic violations on top of that,” said Ihme. “So, the committee was in agreement with all those and figured that they were the direction that we should be taking.”
