Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak this evening about a topic that came to light just recently again in my area.
There was a crime being committed in a rural area, and there were a number of local people who happened to find out about it. There were shots fired in the air, not at the perpetrator of the crime, but in the air, which stopped the criminal. Eventually the RCMP showed up and arrested him. Initially the RCMP thanked the local citizens for helping them capture this person. Of course, days later, the RCMP started saying that they did not want people to be vigilantes and that it was their business to take care of it.
This is an ongoing issue. The RCMP have attempted to establish some crime groups in the area to break up some of these criminal organizations, but they tend to be closer to the major centres of Edmonton or Calgary.
There was a constituent I met the last week I was home working with constituents. He discovered someone breaking in and stealing his vehicle, while using a stolen vehicle. His wife had gone to work, thankfully. He happened to own a plane. He contacted the RCMP and said that he was going to go up and fly around to see where the stolen vehicle had gone. The RCMP said, “Great, let us know.” The man followed it and was able to get a licence plate number, with technology. That is how he found out that the vehicle was stolen.
The criminals went to another place and broke into another home, where there was a single person home, a woman. He found out later that they stole her purse and keys, and off they went. She came out chasing them. They could see this from the plane. Again, the criminals almost ran over her. Then they proceeded to another area. By this time, the plane had followed them for two hours. The response from the RCMP was that it was dangerous to chase them. It was very frustrating.
People in rural areas are very angry. That is why there was that incident recently where local people shot guns in the air. That did stop a criminal in the act he was committing.
The RCMP is frustrated. The other part of it, as the RCMP will say, is that people are just going through a revolving door in the justice system. If they are caught, they are charged. The RCMP will tell people to keep their keys or check their vehicles, because on their way out the door, these criminals will just steal another car to get out of there.
The revolving door for these continuous crimes is really a problem in my area in rural Alberta. The public safety committee did a crime task force report on it. It is a real problem in the sense that people lack trust. When people do not have trust, they resort to other means. The last thing we want to see is vigilantism and people taking their own guns out.
This is a real problem. We need more of a response from the government in the sense of how people can deal with it through resources for the police or the justice system. We need this type of crime dealt with and dealt with soon, before we have a more serious incident involving a homeowner or vehicle owner in rural Alberta.