The Estevan RCMP used a pandemic-influenced reduction in calls to focus on the small portion of the population responsible for a large chunk of crime in the area.
The violent crime severity index for the detachment decreased by around 11 per cent (from 64.30 to 57.24) in 2021 compared to the previous year, according to last week's Statistics Canada Crime Severity Index. The non-violent crime severity index fell by nearly 37 per cent (from 102.97 to 64.98).
The combined index decreased from 92.90 to 63.04 - a 32.14-per-cent improvement.
Estevan RCMP Cpl. Craig Park said they weren't surprised to see those figures.
"We don't have a lot of violent crimes in the area," he said. "A small decrease is expected. And again, in the non-violent crimes, it's a broad range. The fact that people aren't active as much, there's not as much traffic on the road during these lockdown periods."
The Estevan RCMP used some freed-up time to tackle some other initiatives.
"When we get these lulls we try to do a targetted approach towards some of our more prolific offenders," said Park. "Especially for our violent ones. For the most part, we have a small population of people that are committing a large number of our crimes."
Park said they also worked more on public education regarding fraud.
"A lot of our fraud files and stuff that come in, we try to curb a lot of that through education. Especially some of these online crimes."
Park anticipates an uptick in those numbers now that events are happening with much more frequency.
"If they do tend to go up in the next year or two, it's not going to be a big shock to us and I don't think it's going to indicate a rise in crime in the area. Again, we have a fairly safe community here, and our numbers are affected very easily because of our low numbers."
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