A review of the past year was on the agenda during a recent community consultation between Carman Area RCMP members and local council officials. When it came to calls for service in 2016, Staff Sergeant Joanne Prejet says the number is about the same from 2015.

"Our highest (call volume) is involving vehicles either accidents or impaired drivers, our second-highest files are property crimes which would be thefts or break-and-enters, and our lowest of the three major crimes that we look at is crimes against persons."

Prejet adds the annual meeting-style get together also reviewed the area that the detachment serves, members' years of service and what they can offer, as well as the training that they require. Overall, she feels local officials were pleased with what members accomplished this past year.

From there, Prejet says the meeting took a different direction and participants examined how to address some concerns that came up and how to move forward for the next year. The main concern was traffic safety.

"A lot of our involvement is accidents," explains Prejet, "because we have major highways, we have bad roads with weather, we have the possibility of maybe flooding coming." She says officials need to look at how to police and run other emergency services within a flood area or an area where traffic has dramatically increased because of flooding in another area.

Prejet adds members are also looking at increasing awareness around driving on gravel roads, noting the detachment investigated several rural road fatalities in 2016. "We want to try and make it a little bit safer or just be out there and have people recognize that they can't expect a blind intersection not to have another car coming, or maybe you need to have more experience to travel on some of these gravel roads."

 

Local fire fighters were also invited to the consultation. Prejet says Carman RCMP worked numerous major scenes with local fire officials and wanted some feedback to ensure officers were doing their job in a cooperative way.

She explains that STARS Air Ambulance responded to twenty-two calls in the area this past year, and in some situations the helicopter was forced to land directly on a highway. Prejet adds it takes a lot to make the scene safe for the victims, emergency personnel and for the other motorists waiting to go through.

"We found that the public is sometimes a little frustrated waiting, because sometimes it takes quite a while (to clean up a scene) especially if the accident is a fatality, we want to make sure people are safe. If they decide to take another route we can't tell them where to go so we have to make sure people know where they're going. It's a concern for us because we have had people leave and go somewhere else and then get lost."

She says participants also looked at how to properly stop traffic at an accident scene and have drivers understand that there are people working and they can't go racing through the area.

Meantime, Thursday's meeting included a guest speaker from Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation who explained the process for road improvements.

In fact, Prejet notes a representative from Headingley Traffic Services was headed to a meeting the follow day to talk about just that intersection. "That's a positive thing for us, for the community."