Public satisfaction with the visibility of Codiac RCMP dropped 10% year over year but the RCMP aren’t overly concerned.
That came out at a presentation by Inspector Jamie George to the Codiac Regional Policing Authority meeting last night.
The surveys are performed by a senior marketing class at New Brunswick Community College, and the partnership has been going on for a few years now.
George says several factors influenced that drop in visibility, including the difference as officers left the Greater Moncton area after the events of June 4th in 2014.
“But as life gets back to normal, people start to focus on other things that become more forefront to their minds, their own issues, other things that come up,” says George. “And then of course their thought processes towards the police are not what they were the year previous so I think that affects it.”
George says they’ve been working with a senior marketing class at the New Brunswick Community College for a few years doing surveys.
He adds the drop is partly the result of timing.
The survey was conducted shortly after a high profile murder and string of armed robberies at the end of 2015 and early 2016.
“If somebody was coming to ask me about how I felt in my community, and I knew that there were murderers at large, and armed robberies going on I’d probably be a little concerned as well,” says George. “So I think the timing does influence the result a little, however those are challenges that we want to acknowledge, we want to accept and move towards correcting them next year.”
He says he is not discouraged by the results.
“The problem I think was that we didn’t have a strategy to talk about the positive things that we were doing,” says George. “We talked about the things that were going on, but we didn’t talk about the things that we were doing to address the things that were going on, and I think we missed an opportunity there that we’re going to try to build on this year.”
George says they are continuing with annual surveys with more specific objectives, including asking how safe people feel in their community as opposed to the visiblity of police presence.
George maintains Codiac RCMP is doing a terrific job, with 85-percent of serious crimes solved.
However, he says they need to communicate more effectively to inform the public about their actions.
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