Drugs and guns 'major concerns' for Regina's police chief

Regina's police chief saiddrugs and guns are having "deep-reaching effects throughout the whole city" in hisyear-end interview with the CBC.

Speaking to CBC Television's Jill Morgan, Chief Evan Bray discussed the state of the Regina Police Service and his concerns about rising crime rates.

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"The crime rate is driven a lot by the prevalence of meth in our community," said Bray.

"The amount of guns we're seeing and seizing, the amount of people that are being injured or threatened with a weapon. Those are things that we are not comfortable with as a city."

According to the most recent Board of Police Commissioners report, attempted murders almost quadrupled in Regina this past year.

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Between the end of November 2015 and the end of November 2016 there were 31 attempted murders in Regina, compared with eight over the same period a year earlier.

There were seven attempted murders in November of this year alone, according to the report.

Property crimeslike arson, break-insand motor vehicle theft all rose in 2016 as well.

"A lot of crime rates went up," said Bray. "People doing what they have to do to try and get the money to buy the drugs."

Bray said Regina police are going to work "aggressively" to try to curb crime and violence in the city by getting at the root of the problems.

"Let's work with addictions, let's work with social services... education, health," he said.

"That improves the health and safety of our community if we can provide a holistic, social justice view of things, rather than always catching the bad guy, locking them up."

'New eyes and fresh eyes'

Kim Sutherland, founder of Street Culture Kids Project in Regina, was inspired by Bray's comments on addiction.

Street Culture works predominantly with teenagers aged 16 to 18 who are involved in the judicial system or social services. Sutherland said the greatest number of referrals come from the justice system.

He said there is no question what the kids do is criminal in that instance.

"But when you look at the motive behind it, I think [Bray] is identifying addiction as the issue," Sutherland said. "That's a huge amount of our work."

Sutherland said the relationship between the program and police "has been unprecedented" in recent years, compared to the first 15 or 17 years of the group's growth.

"There is a willingness within the police force to look at the criminal element with new eyes and fresh eyes."

Addiction is just one of many factors someone could bedealing with, Sutherland said. Generally, someone who is addicted to meth or any other narcotic will have a higher level of poor health plus a lower levelof education and their struggles are a culmination of many layers, he added.

"The greatest challenge, however, is when the systems, however defined, isolate the challenge and try to work with it as something independent of all these other social ills," Sutherland said. "And that's where we seem to fail."

Gun violence in Regina

Gunshots erupted in busy public places twice in 2016. Two men were sent to hospital with gunshot wounds after a shooting at the Pump Roadhouse nightclub in the early morning hours on April 29.

Omar Abdi Hakim Haji-Hussein, 31, was later arrested and charged with two counts of attempted murder.

On Aug. 15, a 34-year-old man was shot in the back while dining at Viet-Trung Garden.

The owner of the restaurant told CBC there were about 50 people in the restaurant at the time of the shooting.

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