Prince George’s Standing Committee on Public Safety is set to discuss how overnight policing can be improved in the city’s downtown at its next meeting on March 18.
A report attached to the agenda prepared by Eric Depenau, the city’s director of administrative services, goes over four options to improve overnight policing in brief that have been brought up by committee members at previous meetings.
The first is hiring third-party private security to patrol the downtown core between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Hiring two security guards with a vehicle to do so is expected to cost around $400,000 per year, which Depenau’s report said would be best paid for as a local area service.
Local area services are paid for by establishing a tax on properties in the area that would benefit from them.
“The committee may choose to recommend to Council that the municipality work with the Downtown Prince George Business Improvement Association to canvass its membership for interest in establishing a local area service to hire overnight security in as an option to move this approach forward,” the report said.
“The committee may also recommend what value, if any, the municipality should contribute to such a program.”
Under this approach, the city would have to be careful as BC’s Community Charter places restrictions on the kinds of assistance municipalities can provide to businesses.
The second approach is to hire additional bylaw officers to patrol the downtown core from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Currently, there are eight bylaw officers who patrol the downtown core in teams of two across four different shifts across the entire week.
“Establishing a night shift may be an option if the committee is interested in having additional staff present in the downtown area overnight,” the report said. “These staff could also support other calls for service during these hours (noise, burning complaints, parkade checks).”
The rough cost of hiring four bylaw officers, including equipment and training, is $395,672 per year. The report suggests that the committee might want to direct staff to study best practices, including similar measures other municipalities have taken, and return with a report before deciding on this route.
The third option is to pay for additional RCMP officers more quickly. In 2022, a resource review of the Prince George RCMP detachment recommended that 19 more officers focusing on various aspects of policing be hired.
Administration has spread out the additions of those officers over time, with four officers being added to each year’s budget from 2023 through 2026 and three more being added in 2027.
“For example, the committee could recommend going above the likely staffing enhancement request of 4 in the next budget cycle and instead suggest Council approve 5, 6, or 7,” Depenau’s report said. “Additional comment that these positions should be focused on addressing downtown concerns could be communicated to the RCMP.”
That last point is because while the city contracts out policing services to the RCMP, Prince George cannot give direct commands to the Mounties.
The fourth and final option outlined in the report is to bring back the overnight fire patrols that ran in 2024.
Last year, complaints about downtown fires led Prince George Fire Rescue, bylaw services and the RCMP launched collaborative patrols on foot and in vehicles to track down and document them.
One bylaw officers, one RCMP officer and one firefighter patrolled the downtown between 10 a.m. and 6 a.m. three times per week for four to six weeks as part of the program. However, the report notes that staff availability was a challenged and not every patrol had the full complement of personnel.
“Further, enforcement against those burning refuse for warmth and security has generally been an unsuccessful tactic,” the report said. The patrols located 58 fires, some of which were said to be unattended, but were all easy to extinguish.
Reinstituting these patrols would increase the number of staff on shifts for Prince George Fire Rescue and overtime hours for bylaw services.
For PGFR alone, staffing the patrols was expected to cost between $20,000 and $24,500. The report said that the committee could recommend to the council to put $30,000 towards this project and recommend that it become a recurring initiative starting next year.
The meeting starts at noon on March 18 in the second-floor boardroom at Prince George City Hall.
