The Duncan – North Cowichan RCMP have 59 officers in the detachment when they are at full strength.
And they are busy.
Inspector Chris Bear, Officer in Charge said the call volume they deal with continues to increase.
“We had 6,236 calls, 5,536 were for the same quarter in 2017, so we are showing an increase of 9.6 per cent in files. So, we’ve seen that we’ve had a busy summer again and compared to last year, the stats just keep going up.”
Bear said assaults, property crime and theft from motor vehicles are up from past quarters.
Bear said missing persons account for a number of files.
“We can compare them almost as high as Nanaimo’s. Through July through August last year we had 217 files, this year, same period, we’re down to 199. So we are seeing a little bit movement with that. Missing persons files are probably the worst files because we never know whether it’s going to be a homicide or just an overdue youth from a group home.”
Those numbers are for the period of July, August, and September.
The total of missing persons files police have dealt with in 2018 was 560.
Bear said they’ve had some success on those files working on reporting procedures with local group homes.
From January through to September, 21 per cent of the calls police responded to came from Duncan, 48 per cent of the calls came from the Municipality of North Cowichan, 14 per cent came from First Nations land and the rest came from the Provincial area or were from people who walked into the office directly.
