On Aug. 8, after five years as the officer in charge of the Prince George RCMP detachment, Shaun Wright called it a career and retired.
Since taking on the duties as superintendent, the 50-year-old Saskatoon native has seen some turbulent times while overseeing a city with a crime rate in 2021 that was ranked third-worst in all of British Columbia.
The COVID-19 pandemic, public resentment of police, B.C’s legalization of hard drugs, the nationwide rise in violent crime and the effects of the federal Bill C-75 that limit the ability of law enforcement agencies to detain habitual criminals - all have contributed to the difficulty of being in charge of a police detachment with crime-fighting resources stretched thin among a staff of 160 officers.
After 28 years serving and protecting Canadians in Surrey, Mission and Prince George, Wright and his wife plan to remain PG residents and are looking forward to exploring northern B.C. as tourists without a timeline, free from the stress and pressures that come with being a police officer.
Citizen reporter Ted Clarke sat down with Wright on his second-last day on the job to discuss some of the most pressing issues his yet-to-be-named replacement will have to take on.
Prominent on that list is the Patricia Boulevard (Moccasin Flats) encampment, the fentanyl/opioid crisis, the difficulty of laying charges on apprehended criminals, the province’s three-year experiment with drug decriminalization and how the addition of officer body-cams will change the face of policing in Prince George.
Citizen: Congratulations on your retirement. It’s coming early for you. How old are you?
Wright: Just 50 now, so yeah, it’s young to retire, but it's been a bit of a grind for 28 years at times. I came into this job in 2019, in the summer, and then COVID hit, early 2020. That was just kind of a mess for everybody, everywhere, but pretty stressful and problematic for us, having to navigate as a 24/7 agency that serves the public, so very challenging. Along with that at the same time there was a definite increase in anti-police sentiment throughout society, kind of rising from the summer of 2020 and the social unrest over some issues when I think a lot of people were out of school, out of work and had a lot of time on their hands. So that was challenging to navigate. One thing about that I will say is you know what, Prince George is a really supportive community. So I think overall the general citizenship was still very supportive of us.
C: What was driving that resentment?
SW: That was really from the States, a lot of those protests after George Floyd's death in 2020 out of Minneapolis. There was just a ripple effect right across North America and we saw a little bit of that here in Prince George. It really affected the membership of the detachment because culturally we just bore the brunt of it because it was carried in the media a lot and on social media. So yeah, it's been challenging times the last five years.
C: In January 2023 to B.C. government introduced a pilot program that allows adults to use hard drugs for personal use free from the risk of facing criminal charges. What did that do to change the job of a police officer?
SW: Decriminalization, in my personal opinion, is probably the most horrific failure of public policy that I've seen in the last three decades. So it's been partially walked back (it’s now illegal to use hard drugs in public places), but obviously the long-term effects from that year where it was in full swing is going to take us years to try and walk back the effects of that.
C: When you say it's the most horrific public policy change, why do you think that?
SW: I just think it encouraged or resulted in a significant increase in public disorder and the normalization of hard drug use, which I think is extremely detrimental to our young people. It also did nothing to serve the people who are already addicted and really focused the mindset on how to facilitate people that want to engage in that activity rather than assist them in getting out of that cycle of addiction.
C: There is a lack of treatment centres to fall back on, so you guys could say "here's where you go if you want to kick drugs." Those resources are still very limited and that has to be a big frustration in your job.
SW: Oh, it's a massive frustration. So I think back to, I want to say the late 1990s, early 2000s, we always talked about the four pillars of addiction of drug use and it was education enforcement, harm reduction and treatment. And really what I've seen for the last several decades is focused almost solely on harm reduction. So really it's just been facilitating that behaviour rather than preventing it or addressing it with treatment on the back end.
C: Are we unique in that in B.C.?
SW: I think we are. My personal opinion is we're ahead of the curve on that, for sure. Obviously Alberta is starkly, politically different, and there’s a much heavier focus on treatment rather than just harm reduction to facilitate that ongoing behaviour. When decriminalization came out here in the province there was a provincial mandate that police would have information cards that we could provide people we find using drugs or in possession of drugs on how to get treatment in a system. Which is a great theory, but in practice the cards that we were issued, 90 per cent of the information on it was how to seek out harm reduction services, not "where can I go to detox today" and that sort of thing. So I think it was more lip service to the treatment aspect of things, in my personal opinion.
C: I wrote a story a couple of months ago about guys that were coming from jail and going into a Prince George halfway house that requires abstinence and forbids any substances. They say there's only one other place in B.C. like that, where you can go into a halfway house where everybody is abstinent. Every other residential recovery centre allows harm reduction drugs and they say they don’t want that that's not the way to get then to quit drugs. So the pendulum has obviously swung too far.
SW: I would agree.
C: It’s not hard to find street people in downtown Prince George and there’s an obvious perception they are tied to drugs and crime. When I moved here in '93, you might see the odd drunk on the streets, but you didn't see the "zombies" we see now. People are worried about their safety downtown. Business and property owners downtown don’t know what to do.
WS: I don't know if there's much they can do, because it's a massive social issue. So yeah, until that pendulum swings back, unfortunately I think we're going to see this for quite some time. Finally they did backtrack so you can’t use in public anymore and that’s given us back some of the key authorities we had to interact with these people to move them along so they aren’t smoking meth in front of the entrance of a shop that a mother and her children want to go into. But over the course of that year or year and a bit, that behaviour became very normalized, so it's an uphill battle to try and educate all of these people that that's now unacceptable and you can't do that in public anymore.
C: Every day in B.C. an average six people die of illicit drug overdoses and the Northern Interior and Prince George have among the highest death rates in the province. The opioid crisis continues to kill at the same rate, despite the province’s decision to give drug users free access to prescribed safer supply harm reduction drugs. So what is the answer?
SW: If you keep doing the same thing or increasing what you've already been doing and the problem just continues to get worse, maybe you need to adopt a different strategy, not just increase access to opioids. I find it comical that some governments are suing or have sued opioid manufacturers for the opioid crisis because they over-prescribed them and that's what caused this and then some governments are handing them out to anybody that wants them prescribed to them, which strikes me as the exact same thing. I find that hard to reconcile.
C: You raised the issue of safer supply drugs being resold to drug dealers who turn around and sell them to other people. How much of a problem is that in Prince George?
SW: I’d say it's a significant problem. When we've conducted investigations into that I would say probably close to 50 per cent of the persons obtaining it during our observation period were selling or trading those drugs, and I think the really unfortunate thing about that is those drugs seem to find their way into the hands of younger users, and it kind of seems to be a potential gateway into illicit drug use. I don't know if that's because people see it as pharmaceutically packaged and they feel it's safer. Unfortunately, I couldn't comment on that but perhaps.
C: So are we creating more addicts because of that?
SW: I don't have quantitative evidence to say that, but anecdotally, my personal opinion would be yes, I think if you're funnelling more opioids into that market, it's inevitable.
C: During your time as a police officer in Prince George fentanyl has become the street drug of choice. It's cheap and readily available. Is that the biggest change in the drug culture you've seen during your career?
SW: It's a huge change and that was kind of concurrent with the opioid overdose death when the crisis started, obviously fentanyl is so much more potent than kind of the previous opioids that used to be common. We got all kinds of warnings not to be around fentanyl, even small quantities of it, and everybody needs to avoid this because you'll easily overdose. And then quickly, in the first year or two, we found that users on the street were actually seeking it out because they preferred the high of it. So even though there was a massively increased risk to them, it quickly became their drug of choice. The vast majority of other types of street drugs are mixed or contaminated with it as well.
C: You’ve called the Moccasin Flats encampment the busiest 300 metres you have in your jurisdiction. What have you learned from policing the camp and interacting with the 30-50 people that live there?
SW: I think the most eye-opening thing to me was the number of people who are there, who have been given the option of some sort of shelter or housing and have turned it down and probably the most shocking thing to me was several individuals who ended up going into the housing in the former Knights Inn when that first became low-barrier housing. They maintained that and they still had their unit there. But then in the summer, several of them would just go and camp at the encampment anyway because they enjoyed the lifestyle. For whatever reason, it's agreeable to them.
C: Drug addictions are a common bond with Moccasin Flats residents. You said it yourself, at Knights Inn, at one time, half of the people living were drug dealers. If we solve the illicit drug problem, chances are we're going to make a dent in homelessness as well?
SW: I think so. And you know what? There's always the argument that we shouldn't or can't force people into treatment. They have the right to make their choices. So if they're going to use opioids, let's just make it as safe as we can for them. But from what I've observed, people who are regular users of opioids are in no state to make rational choices about their own health.
C: Structure fires are a regular occurrence at Moccasin Flats. It's like once every couple of weeks there’s another campsite that burns. We've heard it's drug dealers targeting people. They just go there and say, look, if you don't pay an extortion fee, we'll set your place on fire. Is that what is happening?
SW: We haven't found evidence to that effect. Having said that, most of the individuals down there are completely unco-operative with us when we go down to investigate those types of incidents. So I would suspect that is part of it and also a large part is just the unsafe conditions of a lot of those structures.
C: The city plans to close it down this fall and move the people to alternate housing. So how do we prevent another Moccasin Flats from getting established? What lessons have we learned?
SW: If you look at the strategy that city council has endorsed that administration put forward it’s probably a good general plan - providing an area where there is overnight sheltering available, but ensuring that it doesn't become entrenched. I think the biggest problem with the Lower Patricia encampment was really when the city went and tried to get an injunction to remove it, and then the court essentially gave it court-ordered protection. So there was really nothing that could be done in the short term thereafter.
B: Speaking of the courts, I think B.C. is the only province or territory where Crown prosecutors decide what charges are laid. Police have that power and every other jurisdiction is, that right?
SW: I believe New Brunswick as well. But yeah, essentially B.C. is the primary jurisdiction like that.
C: How much does that affect your ability to fight crime?
SW: I would say it's significantly increases our workload. We’re obligated to provide full disclosure on the front end. So lab results, for DNA or ballistics, which can take months or many months to obtain, are typically required just to put forward a case for charge approval. Whereas systems used in some other provinces, you wouldn't need all of that complete detail, you would just need the essential information relating to the charges to make that assessment. We run into this all the time in Prince George, we execute a search warrant and we locate a quantity of illicit drugs, maybe fentanyl, as well as multiple firearms, we're typically releasing those people without even a court date at that point, because we need to complete the investigation. That means getting those firearms tested, getting the drugs tested, getting all the supplementary. Information together and disclosing all of that to Crown counsel for them to make a charge. For many many months, they will be at large without even having been charged.
C: Why does the province not see this as a problem?
SW: All I can tell you is I view it as a problem.
C: It has to be one of your biggest frustrations as a police officer.
SW: Absolutely it is.
C: In a typical shift, how much time are RCMP officers spending on paperwork and not actually hunting criminals or preventing crime?
SW: It's an incredible amount and every year it seems to grow as further requirements are placed upon us. Case in point, body-worn cameras are going to come to Prince George, likely in October, so our frontline members are going to have to take the segments of video they record and they're going to have to mark part of those recordings for redaction for support staff to do that. But obviously, only the people there know what's relevant and what needs to be redacted, so it does take a bit more of their time. It will add to their workload.
C: The so-called catch-and-release Criminal Code changes introduced by the federal government in 2019, that’s got to be a sore spot with you. It’s one thing most Canadians complain about, that violent offenders and repeat criminals caught in the act are being let go right away.
SW: Absolutely, it’s extremely frustrating. They've increased electronic monitoring and that sounds great, in theory, but there's a lot of issues with that program with the functionality of the equipment oftentimes. We found some very serious violent crimes over the last couple of years where multiple offenders have been already on electronic monitoring, so it's not even remotely the same as having someone remanded in custody. It's a huge problem, those changes.
C: In March, you spoke publicly about the growing influence of Lower Mainland gangs on crime in Prince George. How has that changed the face of the city?
SW: Over the last couple of years it definitely has been a key driver in a lot of our significant violent events, in many of our homicides and serious assaults as those individuals either struggle to push into the market or just assert their dominance within the illicit drug market up here. So yeah, we continue to see those individuals related to those criminal organization organizations coming up here to Prince George and surrounding communities like Quesnel.
C: Compared to other similar-sized cities in Canada, is Prince George one of the worst for crime?
SW: That's what the crime statistics bear out. When you look at comparator communities in B.C., maybe Nanaimo, Kamloops for roughly the same population size, we have higher crime rates here in Prince George and I think that's traditionally always kind of been the way. Northern communities in most provinces typically have higher crime rates. Usually when the crime severity index numbers come out from Statistics Canada, we're up fairly high. One bright spot, though, I think kind of the increase in resources that we've been able to secure with the mayor and council over the last few years, we've seen a decrease in our file load per member and our crime rates and we've actually fallen on the CSI list from Statistic Canada. We're still very high on it, but we have managed to comparatively move down on that list. It's given us the capacity to bolster our downtown safety unit to focus more on repeat violent offenders.
C: When you look back on your RCMP career, what stands out as a highlight?
SW: I think that would be having worked with city leaders and administration on the policing resource review in 2022 and developing a plan to implement the path forward to add additional resources to the detachment. Given the high crime rate in the city, it was a priority for me to lower the very high caseload experienced by members at the detachment. Reducing the caseload is critical to ensuring the well-being of our members and creating the capacity to provide a higher level of policing service to the public.
C: So now that you’re retired, what are your plans?
SW: I don't plan to do too much, at least for kind of the first six months or year. My wife and I have lived up here about eight years. We came up from the Lower Mainland and we always talk about these places we want to go in the north and see and with work and everything, we haven't gotten to most of them. So we're going to spend some time travelling around and seeing the nature and beauty of the north over the next few years.
