Wolfville looks at community policing for noise complaints, other nuisances

Town officials in Wolfville are looking at the possibility of community-based policing to tackle noise and other nuisances.

Like other university towns, residents have long complained about the frustration caused by loud parties. Wolfville is home to Acadia University.

Mayor Wendy Donovan told CBC Radio's Information Morning Nova Scotia the town is in the process of doing a police service review to look at ways of dealing with the concerns.

Their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and length. 

What specifically have been the issues that residents say they want to see addressed? It's not just parties, right?

We are actually in the process of doing a police services review.

Many of the things that people call the police for or want the police to deal with are more the mischief, the irritants, small property damage — probably not the things that the RCMP is best trained to deal with.

As part of our police review, we engaged Stephen Schneider who is a criminology professor at Saint Mary's University [in Halifax].

He suggested this concept of a community service officer to us and the more we looked into it, the more we thought this makes sense for Wolfville. Not to replace the police, but to be a complement to the police.

Could you give us a little more detail perhaps on how potentially this office could work?

Imagine it as something between our bylaw staff and the police.

This is somebody who is in the town, who is a municipal staff, who reports to our CAO [chief administrative officer], who is walking around the town, who engages regularly, weekly, daily with the university, who people know and who has the capacity to address those issues literally on the street.

So I see them as as somebody whose name people know but for us to be able to connect also with the RCMP.

For example, we know that there is a drug issue in town ... for me that's a policing issue.

Somebody who know where things are happening and who knows our community, can work with the RCMP, not to solve that problem, but to be eyes on the ground.

What other attributes do you think a person like this would need to be able to do a job like this? You could be walking into some situations where you basically have to try to calm people down or quiet down the situation. It takes a certain personality to be able to do that.

Dr. Schneider has been engaged to basically look at those things.

What will it cost? What kind of person? Is it more than one person? What kind of hours of operations, what will the interface be with the RCMP, with the town's administration? What are the limitations of this role?

Once he has finished that study, which I'm assuming will be sometime in the fall, then we will be able to take that information and make an operational decision on it.

Do you look to other jurisdictions on this to see if perhaps there might be an example that you could follow?

I'm not aware of anything in our immediate area.

It's not a new thing. This is not a Wolfville problem. 

I think we're seeing this all over, at least in North America, that need to have some type of community policing while at the same time having the kind of policing that we have with the RCMP or with the town police to deal with more major issues that cross our municipal borders.

Is the policing review working in concert with this idea of a community safety officer?

Most of what our police are having to deal with are those more mischief and minor minor issues. 

In the process of looking at how we might police that Dr. Schneider brought this idea to us.

We are we are now negotiating a contract with the RCMP which will give us somewhat more control over what the police officers for Wolfville do. That is going on at the same time as we're looking at a community safety officer.

MORE TOP STORIES