Addressing youth crime a priority for M.L. RCMP
With a recent rise of youth crime in Meadow Lake and the surrounding region, Sgt. Ryan How of the Meadow Lake RCMP has made youth-related crime a focus of the detachment in recent years and that focus seems to be paying off.
“We’ve made it a priority to address youth crime over the last few years,” he said. “We were very optimistic over the last couple of years until this summer, we thought we were making progress, we ran into a unique problem this year, and it took several months to get a handle on it.”
Given recent incidents like manslaughter charges, and the sentencing of a youth uttering threats with a knife, Meadow Lake has seen a slight increase lately, but the focus of reducing youth crime has not changed. One recurring theme with youth is a high amount of property crime offences.
He said this summer’s number of occurrences were directly attributable to a group of six youth who were re-offending, causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage to property, if not into six figures, How said.