Hexadecimal Monkey

Today we had a community crime prevention meeting for the members of the various strata in our area.  A member of the Vancouver Police force came to chat with us about problems (and perceived problems) in the area and ways to improve both our security and our sense of security.  

What was quite interesting was to hear the constable’s impression of our area: she emphasized that we actually are living in an area that is incredibly low in crime compared to other areas of the city.  That statement was interesting because the reason we called the meeting in the first place was that there had been a few break-and-enters in the last weeks of summer, and the residents were becoming concerned.  It was incredibly interesting, though, to hear about the VPD’s overall plans for dealing with this recent activity and then to compare our situation with other areas.  

A few miles from our location there are a series of residential towers.  Based on a sophisticated investigation over a number of weeks, the VPD gained enough evidence to warrant a search of one of the buildings.  In that one tower alone, 5 condos were found to have been converted into grow-ops; in several cases there was up to 18 inches of soil on the floor throughout the entire unit.  Essentially marijuana farms were tens or hundreds of feet in the air, right between people living rather normal lives who didn’t expect to be living in quite so close proximity to agricultural activity. 

What was amazing was the plea from the officer to the attendees of our meeting: please report any crimes you see, including those that happen to you or against your property. I couldn’t help but wonder who wouldn’t report crimes such as break and enters that happen to their own properties, but apparently such a lack of reporting is quite common.  Amazing.  

We eventually got into discussion of setting up a Block Watch program here, and finally we’re getting some traction.  The requirements are so minimal to get going, but it’s been historically difficult to get any people to actually commit to doing anything.  However, today we got solid commitment from at least a half dozen people, and I think more will come around.  

At any rate, we were treated to some excellent information and lots of face-to-face community building.

Among the things we learned about were:

• the crime statistics maps that are updated weekly on the VPD site
• block watch
• Our local community policing centre
• Safe communities events grants that a community can use to fund neighbourhood get-togethers to promote safer communities

Very useful meeting. Vancouver makes some amazing resources available and that’s probably just one of the many reasons that it rates so highly amongst the best places to live.