By Ashley Wiebe

Survey shows residents feel less safe, crime increasing

Jan 19, 2018 | 10:45 AM

MEDICINE HAT, AB — According to a recent public survey, residents feel less safe and believe crime has increased in our city.

The Medicine Hat Police Commission was presented the findings of the Policing and Community Safety Public Survey at the meeting on Thursday night.

Alec Milne with Framework broke down the numbers, showing that the survey was done over the phone between November 20th and December 15th.

406 people responded to statements, including ‘I feel safe living in Medicine Hat’, a number which dropped from 2014, the last time the survey was done.

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“We really need to work on that and just kind of look at it more and determine what we can do, if anything, to bring that level of feeling of safety up ‘cause it really is important that people feel safe in our community,” said Chief Andy McGrogan, who noted the number of files officers were dealing with in the weeks leading up to the survey.

“We just had a pretty serious homicide that was basically, it was on a stranger,” he said. “So I think we went out in the community and said ‘folks, you better make sure you follow some safety precautions’ and then the next month we do the survey and I think that that may have had some of an effect on the fear in our community.”

“There are more drugs in our community as we’ve seen,” said commission chair Greg Keen.

The ALERT Team and local police seized a kilogram of methamphetamine in December, the largest the city has ever seen.

Officers were still working on a number of other files at that time.

“We had that homicide, extortion going on. We had a number of bomb threats, we had an armed robbery to a bank. We had a number of really serious things that were going on and we were pushed to capacity,” McGrogan said, adding it was the busiest fall he can remember for the service.

“I would say our service has never been pushed to the brink of capacity like we were this fall,” he added.

Despite the spike in serious crime, the survey also shows that overall people are satisfied with the service and the work members are doing in the community.

“We want people to feel comfortable and safe in all parts of our community and so I think there’s some good information to take from that to see what the chief and his team can put together,” said Keen.

For more information on the survey, click here.