Sgt. Darcy McGunigal was able to publicly announce to Coronation town council at their regular meeting April 10, that the current status officially on the renovations to the Coronation RCMP Detachment have been put on hold while the RCMP Operations Strategy Branch is now looking a building a new detachment on their owned lots on Windsor Ave., Coronation.
“I do have minimum expectations of what that [a detachment] would have to include,” said McGunigal.
“If we start talking about operational upgrades like having jail cells and that sort of thing, that can expediatiately increase the cost, and I think that is what we are seeing here,” when looking at renovations to their current location.
“Like I said, three years ago, ‘this is something, in my opinion, just has to happen. A detachment cannot function without those operational capabilities.”
Personnel changes
After serving six years in Coronation, Cst. Brian Marinelli has now been reassigned to Nova Scotia and Cst. Diana Stratton is in Edmonton assigned to the Serious Habitual Offenders program. She will be coordinating the program across the province.
“She built it up in Coronation from nothing,” said Sgt. McGunigal. “It speaks of the success that we’ve had with it here.
“It’s the future of policing, I really believe that,” continued McGunigal.
With Interim Sgt. Diana Stratton gone, Sgt. McGunigal will again be taking on the overall responsibility for the Coronation Detachment.
He will still be maintaining his District Advisory role to 27 detachments in east central Alberta. Cpl. Brandon Hastie, who has been running the Consort Detachment for some time, will now be assuming the Sergeant duties for the day-to-day commander operations at the Coronation Detachment.
Cst. Jordan Tourney, a nine-year veteran of the force, from Lloydminster, along with his wife and two young children, will be coming to Coronation Detachment in approx. a month’s time.
Cst. Tourney worked in the general investigation section in Lloydminster with specific focus on drug investigations and enforcement.
“What sold him on coming here was our community involvement, the pace we have here and how involved we are on a personal level with the community,” said McGunigal. “That’s something you don’t get in the larger communities.”
Policing priorities
McGunigal also spoke on the three policing priorities for 2017 with traffic safety and property crime reduction being the same.
Break, enters and theft and vandalism over the same previous three months last year have gone down from 27 to 23; person crimes such as assaults and uttering threats, has decreased over the same period from 16 last year to two this year; 93 traffic tickets were issued and four arrests for impaired driving in the last quarter.
New policing objective includes an overall improvement to service delivery and an education priority through partnerships for crime and driving initiatives such as April being focused on “speed enforcement” as per the Alberta Traffic Safety calender.
The third priority will be substance abuse preventative strategy.
“We have no empirical data that indicates any kind of substance abuse problem in Coronation” but we do not want to wait until we get to that point.
It will be a two-fold program of enforcement and education for the public, especially people with kids, in conjunction with FCSS and Addiction Services, said McGunigal.
