Juno News - June 01, 2019


RCMP staffing shortages put public safety at risk

Mentioned
Peter Germanos Bitcoin
LAWTON： Justin Trudeau's assault on Canadian gun owners Andrew Scheer caves to the left by kicking Conservative MP off committee

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

140.52

Word count

562

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Since its inception in 1873, the RCMP has tried to be all things to all people. It provides contract frontline policing in 8 provinces and 3 territories, but more than that it is also responsible for national security, investigating organized crime, drug enforcement, money laundering, and criminal intelligence. The staffing shortages are affecting all of those areas of the national police force, and it s a significant problem.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 In a recent column I discussed staffing shortages in the RCMP and how that is
00:00:14.520 affecting frontline policing in our communities. Frontline policing is not
00:00:18.960 the only problem. The RCMP since its inception in 1873 has tried to be all
00:00:25.040 things to all people. It provides contract frontline policing in eight
00:00:29.200 provinces and three territories, but more than that is also responsible for
00:00:33.480 national security, investigating organized crime, drug enforcement, money
00:00:38.200 laundering, and criminal intelligence. The staffing shortages are affecting all of
00:00:43.240 those sections of the national police force. It's a significant problem. In 2015
00:00:49.900 the Charbonneau Commission in Quebec found there was a significant link between
00:00:53.680 organized crime, politicians, and the letting of public contracts. And then just
00:00:59.140 last year retired RCMP Deputy Commissioner Peter German tabled a report on money
00:01:04.780 laundering in BC where he identified a significant amount of money was going
00:01:10.660 through the casinos and then in a subsequent report going through real
00:01:14.500 estate. The problem seems to be in the billions of dollars. And yet his report
00:01:19.960 also identified there was nobody in the RCMP who was investigating money laundering.
00:01:24.940 Truth be told, there's also no one in BC that I can tell is investigating Asian
00:01:31.260 organized crime. It seems they only have a few folks that are involved in intel
00:01:36.460 gathering on Asian organized crime and that's about it. There's a problem. The 0.87
00:01:44.580 CFSEU, which is the section responsible for investigating organized crime, seems to be
00:01:51.420 focused entirely on outlaw motorcycle gangs and street gangs. And that's all the
00:01:56.700 resources they have. The staffing shortages are hurting them as well. In my
00:02:02.640 opinion the RCMP needs a fundamental rethink. This is the 21st century with
00:02:07.480 21st century problems. This is brought on by the internet and digital technology
00:02:13.740 and things like Bitcoin and how organized crime groups can send money around the
00:02:20.460 world. And yet in Canada we have no wire transfer laws or mail fraud laws like they
00:02:26.040 do in the United States. We need to rethink how we are approaching things like
00:02:31.320 national security and organized crime. The RCMP as an organization is resistant to
00:02:36.840 change. I have a long referred to as 144 years of tradition unhampered by progress.
00:02:42.600 Well that's tongue-in-cheek but there's a lot of truth in that statement. It is my
00:02:48.360 opinion that the RCMP needs to get out of contract policing and focus on its
00:02:52.680 federal responsibilities. It also needs to build subject matter experts in those
00:02:57.240 fields. Currently members transfer in and out of federal sections and detachments
00:03:02.400 for promotions and career enhancement and the like. And there's also part of a
00:03:08.700 problem that they don't have subject matter experts because of these
00:03:12.300 transfers. If somebody is in an Asian organized crime section as an example or
00:03:18.300 in a money laundering section because of the technicalities involved in those
00:03:22.640 things, once they develop expertise they should be developed as
00:03:27.960 individuals and then and then made subject matter experts not transferred to
00:03:34.260 uniform policing and somewhere in northern Alberta. In my view it's way past
00:03:39.180 time to look at how our national police force functions and the government really
00:03:43.620 needs to take a lead role in this. They need to define how policing services
00:03:49.020 should be delivered to Canadians. After all it is their primary responsibility is the 0.95
00:03:54.420 protection of the public. For True North, I'm Leo Knight.