Years ago in Lac La Biche, Const. Ward Clapham was in a showdown with some law-breaking young punks.
The kids had blocked a road to play hockey, Clapham says, and he'd been called in to ticket them. So, lights flashing, sirens blaring and rock music blasting from a ghetto blaster, he roared up to them, got out of his car, informed the terrified kids of their heinous crimes and asked for a hockey stick.
"We played for 45 minutes," he says, speaking to a packed hall at the St. Albert Inn. "About 45 minutes into the game, they started talking to me," discussing problems with girls and alcohol. He left feeling he had made a real difference in their lives. "I had found my sweet spot."
Clapham, the former RCMP superintendent of Richmond, B.C., credited as the inventor of positive tickets, was a keynote speaker at the Helping Canadian Kids Thrive conference on youth development this week at the St. Albert Inn.
Cops can't fight youth crime through law enforcement alone, Clapham says. "We needed a catalyst," he says, "Something to get us out of the car and office and connecting with young people."
Inspired by his wife and events like the one mentioned above, he had his officers issue positive tickets (coupons for free goodies) when they caught kids doing good.
Those tickets helped his officers get to know the youth of Richmond, he says, and when combined with full-time youth officers and work with community groups, cut youth crime rates by 50 per cent.
"What we found after seven years was that we weren't getting bottles thrown at us at house and bush parties," he says. "We knew who every young person was in our city, and they knew who we were."
Asset building
St. Albert RCMP officers started giving out positive tickets last year as part of the 40 assets program, says Insp. Warren Dosko. About 10,000 have been distributed so far — not nearly enough, he says, but it's a good start.
The 40 assets program is a concept developed by the Search Institute. The group's research has identified 40 assets (such as adult role models and being valued by the community) that significantly reduce a child's risk of doing drugs or breaking the law.
Many adults are afraid to get engaged with youth, Dosko says, but the ticket gives them an excuse to talk with them and build those 40 assets. "It's not the ticket that's the value; it's the relationship, it's the stopping and caring that's the critical piece."
A new approach
It's a major shift in thought for the police, Clapham says, one that took him years to complete.
His first experiment was in Faust, a community near Lesser Slave Lake. "What we were doing was not working," he says; they had high crime despite high arrest rates, and local youths feared the police.
Fed up, then-sergeant Clapham finally asked the youths why they kept getting into trouble. Their answer: no one likes them and they have nothing to do. "We were seeing our young people as a liability."
Clapham closed down youth court, built a large playground and had his incredulous officers drag kids there to play with them. Eventually, hundreds of kids and parents started attending the place. "Our crime rate went from crazy to nothing" in six months, he said. "I was able to reinvest the officers' time into playing with young people." He took this approach with him to Richmond where he combined it with the idea of positive tickets.
Positive tickets encourage people to keep doing good deeds, says Charlotte Cuvilier, a St. Albert Catholic High School student who has received such a ticket. "This is a way to show us that they [the police] actually do notice we're doing good things and we're not all hoodlums."
Busting a kid for stealing to buy drugs won't help the kid, Dosko says. Keep that kid from getting into drugs in the first place through community support instead and you stop the thefts. "Community safety is not about catching bad people. It's about preventing crime."
