Next one likely in Smith

Leader staff

Slave Lake’s RCMP continues to do its ‘Coffee With a Cop’ sessions monthly, more or less. The most recent was at a downtown Slave Lake coffee shop, and Staff Sgt. Casey Bruyns says “a decent amount of people” turned out for a chat about policing issues and so on.

Bruyns characterizes the event as “chatting about a bunch of small issues.” He was there with Sgt. Ted Shillaker to answer questions or offer perspective from the law enforcement point of view.

‘Small issues’ may or may not be how others see some of those topics. One person, for example, talked about being “shocked and appalled” (Bruyns’ term) at what she’d learned about the court system, after spending a couple of months attending Slave Lake Court of Justice sessions.

Members of the Slave Lake On Watch Association attended. They run the recently revived Citizens On Patrol program in Slave Lake Bruyns says one of their suggestions is for the RCMP to set up what’s called a RAVE Alerts system. This would allow signed up citizens to receive alerts directly from the RCMP, “with no middleman,” as Bruyns describes it.

“I’m going to look into it,” he says.

Terry Triskle, Slave Lake On Watch President, says he is already signed up with RAVE Alerts, and gets regular emails and texts from participating RCMP detachments. He, and his group would like the local detachment to be part of the program.

Bruyns says no other Coffee With a Cop sessions are scheduled at the moment, but he wants to do another on in Smith. The first one done in that community was quite successful, he says, so he’d like to do it again sometime in February.