Nanaimo RCMP reported on its newest strategies to deal with repeat violent offenders at city council’s first meeting of 2024.
In his presentation to council on Monday, Jan. 15, RCMP Cpl. Stephen Dupuis explained how a new first-of-its-kind in B.C. special investigation unit evolved out of the ReVOII (repeat violent offending intervention initiative) program.
ReVOII, launched by the province in 2023, is led by B.C. Corrections and brings together police, prosecutors, probation officers, and correctional supervisors to intervene in cases involving repeat violent offenders and connect those deemed suitable for the program with services needed to help break the cycle of repeated violence.
“Essentially the province has taken all the agencies that work within the judicial system … and they’ve allocated funds and programming to people they deem to be high-risk offenders, specifically relating to violence,” Dupuis said.
Nanaimo is one of 12 hubs for the program – others include Victoria, Vancouver, Surrey, New Westminster, Abbotsford, Kamloops, Kelowna, Cranbrook, Prince George, Williams Lake and Terrace – and currently monitors about 40 individuals on the north Island.
“Nanaimo has 13 clients right now,” Dupuis said. “That number fluctuates because the clients move from one city to another or, recently, from the Island to the mainland and, vice-versa, other people move to Nanaimo.”
Once someone is identified for the program, probation officers develop a personalized case management plan with interventions tailored to that person’s needs. The program also includes increased supervision and surveillance by police, but that component won’t necessarily be part of the program indefinitely, Dupuis said.
“The province is still working out how they’re going to manage the list,” he said. “Currently they want everyone who was added to the list to be on it for a minimum of one year, so they can see how the program is impacting them.”
The corporal also spoke about a new special investigations and targeted enforcement (SITE) program, based at the RCMP’s B.C. headquarters in Surrey, which handles detachments’ requests for special funding and support services, such as analysts, labs and forensic work to conduct special investigations projects. Nanaimo RCMP used dedicated funding to create its own unit of eight officers.
“Here in Nanaimo, [Supt. Lisa Fletcher] liked the scope and the wording and the ideas behind SITE, so when she was allocating eight constables for a new unit, she chose the word ‘SITE’ because it enveloped the ideas of what she wanted the team to do,” Dupuis said. “If you were to google ‘RCMP SITE’ there is no other team out there like ours in Nanaimo … We’re the first city to take that mindset and apply it to boots on the ground.”
Nanaimo’s unit started operations in September with Dupuis and four constables. Much of the unit’s early work involved working with intervention hub clients, then branched out to high crime areas to deal with “things that are public and things that are violent.” The unit heavily patrols from the Terminal Avenue, St. George Street and Princess Royal Avenue intersection to Harewood’s University Village.
“That’s where most of the social disorder happens, so we patrol those areas on foot and in vehicles. We use marked police cars to be overt and we use unmarked police cars to do surveillance … We identify cars or any other vehicles that are involved in crime and try to do interdiction,” Dupuis said.
Members of the unit look for people with arrest warrants that have a history of violence, share intelligence with the detachment and spend about one-third of their time responding as a team to new investigations that come up during a shift to take the load off of general duty officers and bring immediate investigative focus to “resource-heavy” files.
“There have been recent files where someone has bear-sprayed a bunch of people,” Dupuis said. “That’s a resource-heavy file. There’s witnesses to manage, suspects to track down and so … we’ll go in as a team of four or five and take the investigation over and that will allow general duty to continue responding to other calls … One of the biggest time balances for those general duty officers is … you have their attention for a while, but the calls for service will take that attention away, so things linger. We’ve been able to go in and tackle a file in a more co-ordinated way.”
The team also works with the bike patrol unit and the City of Nanaimo’s community safety officers to provide a “more co-ordinated approach to downtown.”
Coun. Sheryl Armstrong asked if the courts have been supportive of the program and if violent offenders are being kept in custody when they’re before the courts, and Dupuis reported that the intervention hub has an 80 per cent detention rate.
“Of the 15 or so investigations we’ve forwarded, we’ve only had one person released back into the community,” he said.
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