I'm the team commander and a staff sergeant with the RCMP.
In the fall of 2002, it was noted that an increasing number of cases involving found human remains were determined to be cases of persons who had been engaged in a high-risk lifestyle in the Edmonton area. Our K division criminal operations officer requested that a strategic analysis be completed on all high-risk missing females and unsolved homicides in Alberta.
A report and strategic overview were completed in November of 2002. The overview confirmed that significant numbers of high-risk missing persons and unsolved female homicides were reported in Edmonton as opposed to other parts of the province. In January 2003, the high-risk missing persons project, HRMPP, was formed.
This team incorporated several police analytical processes, investigative file reviews, and major case management protocols. The HRMPP soon expanded its definition to include all high-risk missing persons, regardless of gender. Its mandate was to identify, collect, collate, evaluate, and analyze all high-risk missing persons and unsolved homicide cases in Alberta and the region, determine if they were potentially linked, and, if possible, identify offenders.
That review resulted in a task force being created: Project KARE. The four goals and objectives of Project KARE are as follows: first, to formulate and implement strategies to minimize the lethal risk facing high-risk missing persons; second, to create and pursue investigational strategies to investigate leads and to apprehend and prosecute the serial offender or offenders responsible for these types of crimes; third, to establish an integrated RCMP and EPS homicide unit that enables the Province of Alberta to have a permanent capacity to investigate high-risk missing persons, unsolved historical homicides, and serial offenders; and fourth, to create a template of best practices for utilization in other similar projects nationally.
There are several initiatives within KARE. One of them is the proactive team. This team was established to canvass, identify, and register sex trade workers and others engaged in high-risk lifestyles on the streets of Edmonton.
The members of this unit have been very successful over the past six years in building genuine trust between the unit and those leading high-risk lifestyles. It's allowed for intelligence gathering on persons of interest and potential suspects who interact with sex trade workers.
It also provides an educational and preventative framework to develop reliable information pertaining to the whereabouts, movements, associates, identifying characteristics, and next of kin contacts of sex trade workers. This proactive team is one strategy investigators utilize to collect, analyze, and potentially link information with respect to persons identified as “bad dates”. They present a particular challenge to our conventional methods of enforcement due to the lack of trust between persons living in that environment.
In the Project KARE analytical unit, which contains the Alberta missing persons and unidentified human remains project, there are several initiatives. A website has been developed by that unit. Police can view and search over 180 missing persons and unidentified human remains profiles that contain photos and information gleaned from the RCMP and other agencies.
New cases are added on a regular basis to our missing persons website. In November 2009, Project KARE obtained approval from policing partners in Manitoba and Saskatchewan to import their missing persons data from their provincial missing persons website into the AMPUHR searchable database, which already contained Alberta cases and cases from the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. This will allow us to create a centralized, searchable, missing persons data set.
Project KARE and our Alberta missing persons and unidentified human remains team are contributing partners to the ongoing Canadian strategy on missing persons and unidentified remains. The ultimate goal is to develop a national, searchable, missing persons and unidentified remains database, a publicly viewable website that Canadian police agencies and the coroners services will contribute to and share. This committee is currently looking at ways to adapt existing databases and search tools to meet their needs.