Crime stats
St. Albert cops have fielded new tools to bolster their ability to help those suffering from a mental health crisis, the city’s top cop reports.
The Gazette spoke with Insp. Ryan Comaniuk, the head of the St. Albert RCMP, this week about the city’s third quarter policing report, which was released Jan. 26. The report included statistics on crime trends for 2022.
The report showed that criminal code charges in St. Albert rose 11 per cent last year compared to the year before (4,161 compared to 3,763). Most of this increase was property-related, with property crimes up 17 per cent.
“We had a fairly busy summer last year,” Comaniuk said, with a decent number of vehicle break-ins and vandalism investigated by police.
Comaniuk said this increase was due in part to there being more people out and about now that pandemic-related health restrictions have lifted — many thefts were crimes of opportunity, and there were more opportunities for thieves to strike now that people weren’t stuck at home watching their property.
The report showed how cases involving the Mental Health Act rose seven per cent last year and 58 per cent in the last five.
One of those cases involved the arrest of a 16-year-old non-verbal boy with autism from a St. Albert playground on Oct. 2, 2022. Police were not aware the youth had autism, and took him to hospital after he started harming himself while in custody. The RCMP’s Civilian Review and Complaints Commission and the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team were investigating the arrest.
The St. Albert detachment took many steps last year to improve its handling of mental health calls, Comaniuk said. Officers got a briefing from Autism Edmonton in November on autism spectrum disorder, and now use the HealthIM app to identify mental health risks in clients and get background information on how to help clients in crisis (including a summary of previous encounters with police and techniques known to help that person calm down). In early 2022, the detachment gave frontline officers a mental health toolkit containing items which could help a person suffering from a mental health crisis, such as candy, water, fidget toys, and a whiteboard.
St. Albert Policing Committee chair Todd Walsh said the committee was glad to see the cops adopting new tools such as HealthIM to address mental health cases, and hoped to see the number of such cases decrease this year.
“It was a hard two years for everyone to get through,” he said of the pandemic.
“We’re just trying to get as many resources to help the St. Albert community as best we can.”
The policing report was available at stalbert.ca/city/eps/reports.
Stolen truck recovered
St. Albert police arrested three people with outstanding warrants earlier this month after they were spotted in Campbell Park with a stolen truck.
St. Albert RCMP officers were on patrol in the Campbell Business Park Feb. 8 when they spotted a Ford F150 truck outside a business at about 2:15 a.m., Cst. MJ Burroughs said. The officers checked the truck’s license plate number (as F150s were a common target for theft in the Edmonton region) and learned it was stolen.
Burroughs said the officers located three people associated with the truck inside and nearby the business, and learned one of them had multiple outstanding warrants from other jurisdictions. Police arrested the trio without incident.
Lincoln Rohatynsky, 39, of Edmonton, was charged with identity fraud, possession of a break-in instrument, and possession of property obtained by crime worth over $5,000.
St. Albert resident Michael Kaftan, 34, was charged with 34 counts of possession of a forged document, four counts of theft from mail, and one count each of fraud, identity fraud, failure to comply with a court order, and possession of property obtained through crime worth less than $5,000.
Nikita Pawlick, 35, of Leduc County, was charged with 22 counts of failure to comply with a court order, five counts of identity fraud, and one count of obstructing a peace officer.
Rohatynsky and Kaftan were released on bail while Pawlick was kept in jail. All three were to appear in St. Albert Provincial Court on Feb. 27.
