City CAO uniquely positioned to understand issues facing residents
As a former RCMP officer who worked in both General Duties and Serious Crimes in Fort St. John, the city’s Chief Administrative Officer, Milo MacDonald has a unique perspective on the social issues and crime facing Fort St. John’s residents and businesses.
“The crime that we’re seeing today is different than the crime I was seeing when I was here before,” MacDonald told business owners at the December Chamber of Commerce luncheon. “A lot of the pressures we’re seeing now tend to relate to addictions, mental health and homelessness, and particularly as they relate to fentanyl addictions.”
The changes we’re seeing in Fort St. John, have occurred in less than 20 years. When MacDonald arrived in the city in 2005, the RCMP was mostly dealing with issues surrounding the crack cocaine trade.
For those involved in the drug trade, Fort St. John has always been a violent and ruthless place. Drive-by shootings, targeted at members of criminal organizations for example, aren’t unusual, according to MacDonald.
“That’s because this is a lucrative area to distribute drugs. Primarily related to the fact that we have high incomes, and we have young population. Those two things tend to equate to demand for controlled substances,” he said.
Many in the community, business owners and residents feel that crime is far worse than in the past, but MacDonald believes people are simply more aware of what’s happening.
“Certainly, there are some things that have changed, and have changed for the worse,” he said. “One of the things that has changed substantially is, decriminalization.”
What decriminalization means for the police, is that possession of controlled substances doesn’t result in the possessor being held in custody, and the substances must be returned to the people they were seized from. The altered legal landscape also means that there are fewer undercover operations than previously. Operations that would take large numbers of drug dealers out of circulation, interrupt their relationships, which MacDonald says was a “fairly effective way of managing the crime picture in our community.”
“I used to think we were pretty hard done by in terms of the the sentences we would get for the people we would charge and get convicted, in terms of the hoops we had to jump through. Now I think we had it pretty good by comparison to the police that are operating here today.”
Combine these changes with the lack of supports for people in active addiction, experiencing mental health crises and homelessness, and you have a perfect storm, which is affecting businesses and residents, as well as those in need of support.
The City of Fort St. John is experiencing these crises too, not only because it funds the policing in the community, but because they also fund the fire department, which is regularly impacted by the crises.
First responders are suffering psychological injuries from dealing with the trauma of attending so many overdoses and overdose deaths. The community has had 25 or more overdose deaths this year, and almost a countless number of overdoses, MacDonald said.
“We haven’t really seen any effective public policy in terms of managing the fentanyl crisis. We’ve experimented with a lot of harm reduction initiatives, and a lot of decriminalization initiatives which haven’t really demonstrated any level of success.”
On top of that, shelters are underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded. These factors make recruitment difficult – the pay isn’t great, the working conditions are dangerous and dirty, MacDonald said.
“It attracts a person who is very motivated by improving the welfare in the world, and it’s hard to find people like that sometimes. Most shelters throughout the province have more vacancies than they know what to do with, and I think ours is no exception. We would have more capacity if we had more people.”
MacDonald says he feels bad when he sees the social media response to the Salvation Army, and says people tend to overlook what the situation might be like if the Salvation Army wasn’t here. Because of the nature of the services offered, many of the social issues being experienced in the city are concentrated around the Salvation Army’s facilities.
The municipality, he says, has some power and control, some ability to impact the situation, but its bylaws were largely intended to deal with things like parking motorhomes in no parking zones; residents whose lawns are unsightly; and stereos turned up too loud at night. But now, the city is using the bylaws to compensate for the unwillingness and inability of the provincial government to responsibility for the action that needs to be taken in response the problems in our community.
“We’ve got a handful of residences in this community that are largely associated to the drug trade, that are places where violence happens quite regularly, including gun violence. It threatens the neighbours at those residences,” MacDonald said.
He says the police are doing their best to address the situation, and the city is doing what it can to help both the residents and the police.
“We’re using tools like the nuisance bylaw, and clearly if we’re talking about incidents of gun play, then a nuisance bylaw is really not quite up to the task.”
However, he thinks the acute problems with the two residences causing problems recently, may soon resolve themselves, thanks to conversations with both landlords and tenants.
“It’s unrealistic to think that those problems will disappear from the community. Those problems by their very nature will relocate to another part of the community and they will be problematic elsewhere.”
MacDonald said the city is working on a number of measures to help alleviate the crisis in the community, including urging the province to put the Community Safety Amendment Act into force, a cause many other communities in the province have also taken up. The Act would provide municipalities with a number of tools, including evictions, to encourage owners of problem properties to “act in ways that were in the best interests of the community.”
Creating a Situation Table – to enable the police to work with health, social workers, and housing providers to deal with people who are experiencing social issues such as homelessness, mental health, and addictions, and provide assistance – is another tool, along with Housing First, which would follow the establishment of a Situation Table. The idea behind this tool, is that providing housing support for people, will lead to many of the other problems becoming less serious.
“Much of what we’re doing is waiting for senior levels of government to change. The philosophies of federal and provincial governments need to change.”