Working together for a safer community is the top priority for the Weyburn Police Service in its new strategic plan, released on Monday.
The Weyburn Police Service (WPS) released its 2021 WPS Business Plan, prepared in collaboration with the Weyburn Board of Police Commissioners. The plan serves as a roadmap for the WPS and improves transparency with the community it serves.
“We want to ensure Weyburn remains the best place to live and this plan is an excellent tool for our members to remain accountable,” said Chief Jamie Blunden. “The plan identifies key strategies for us to measure ourselves and keeps us committed to ensuring a safe and health community.”
The three main goals of the 2021 plan are:
• Ensuring a safer community for all;
• Healthy organization; and
• Community engagement.
These goals and objectives were established through strategic planning with the Weyburn Police Board and consultation with community stakeholders.
Major themes identified were drug issues within the community, employee and financial health within the WPS and transparency in the community.
“We want to build on our community relationships to see how we can work better together with organizations like primary health, schools and the City of Weyburn,” Blunden said. “Our goal is to provide the best services we can and develop programming that serves what Weyburn needs.”
In ensuring a safer community for all people, a drug strategy has been developed, which will include enforcement through proactive policing and an organized crime unit.
To determine how well the strategy is working, some of the goals include the number of proactive drug related arrests compared to one year and five-year averages; intervention through external agency partnership and relationships; the number of referrals made to programming; education and awareness programs; and the number of public education and awareness initiatives in schools and around the community.
For the “Enhanced visibility strategy”, the WPS willdevelop new initiatives to increase officers visibility in the community.
The police hope totrack proactive patrol time; utilize current programs to increase officer visibility in the community; initiate new programs that contribute to WPS visibility, and look at crime trend data for property crimes.
For the traffic safety strategy, the WPS will do enforcement through the Traffic Safety Act.
The police service will measure this strategy by the number of offence notices issued correlated with the number of collisions in comparison to one and five-year averages; enforcement through charges laid under the Criminal Code; the number of impaired driving charges when compared to the annual and five-year averages of impaired driving numbers; education and awareness programs; the number of educational and awareness messages and programs developed and implemented.
The entire 2021 WPS Business Plan, along with other business plan resources, can be found on the Weyburn police website (www.weyburnpolice.ca/business-plan).
The public can also leave comments about the business plan on the WPS website to help the organization better respond and connect to the community.
