It is now even easier to keep track of the crime happening in your neighbourhood.
The St. Albert Gazette will now print a copy of the St. Albert RCMP crime map in most Saturday editions to help residents keep an eye on crimes happening in their community.
In March, the St. Albert RCMP were chosen as the first municipality to pilot an interactive online crime map that gives residents a peek at the crimes that are happening around them. The Gazette will use an image of the map from Friday to run in the following day's paper.
The online map has multiple icons layered on top of a map of St. Albert to highlight where crimes have taken place, although the exact location of each crime is not pinpointed due to privacy reasons.
“The idea behind this is to create the awareness in the community for that neighbourly engagement,” St. Albert Insp. Pamela Robinson said in March of the online map.
Six crime types are featured on the map including break and enters, theft, stolen vehicles, missing persons, theft from vehicles and mischief. Some crime types even track sub-categories, like theft of mail, bicycles and oilfield equipment. These crimes were selected as residents have the best opportunity to reduce them through crime prevention strategies.
The RCMP is hoping the map will help encourage citizens to report suspicious activity to the police that may help the RCMP make arrests and track criminals.
Kris Wells, chair of the St. Albert policing committee said that he encourages everyone to use the new crime map.
"The committee has seen the crime map and enthusiastically supports it and thinks it is a great initiative from the RCMP," Wells said.
St. Albert RCMP Cpl Laurel Kading said earlier that the map will also help track patterns and trends throughout the community.
The online map is managed by a St. Albert RCMP crime analyst and the community policing unit and is updated daily between Monday to Friday. It will log 14 days of crimes in the city at any one time.
The online crime map project had been in the works since November but the RCMP needed clearance from Ottawa before launching the project to the public in March.
The map replaced the previous static crime map that the RCMP published regularly up until 2017, but the city then went without a map for more than one year.
The previous map featured crimes over a one month cycle and was published in the Gazette weekly.
The new online map is updated daily from Monday to Friday.
For the most up to date information about crime in St. Albert, the interactive version of the crime map can be found at www.stalbert.ca/city/maps/rcmp-crime-map.
