Last week, Pique spoke with the Sea to Sky RCMP’s new Officer-in-Charge, Insp. Robert Dykstra, for a wide-ranging conversation that touched on everything from his unique career path, increasing community engagement after a year of COVID-19, and rebuilding the relationship with our Indigenous communities after generations of mistrust and mistreatment.
In Part 2 of this Q&A, Dykstra discusses what he sees as the top enforcement priorities in Whistler, how the detachment is gearing up for post-pandemic life, and police’s shifting role in responding to mental-health calls.
If you missed Part 1, pick up last week’s print edition, or head here.
(The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Pique: What do you see as the top policing objectives in Whistler right now?
Robert Dykstra: In terms of the RMOW, Whistler and priorities, it’s timely because we’re working on our strategic plan for the next three years. Some members have been here for quite a long time and know a lot about what’s going on. They did a feedback series with the members who have been working here and also the public, and there’s been this resounding feedback on the kinds of things that are priorities. If I focus on those as priorities, and [Whistler] in particular: in any community, crime reduction, prevention and community safety is always a huge piece. Especially when you think of Whistler in the context of a resort municipality with a large number of visitors that come to the community every single year. So we want to ensure that not only are our local citizens protected, feel safe and feel there are no major crime issues happening but then when visitors come, they also feel safe and they feel comfortable being here.
Those bait bike and bait vehicle programs are hugely popular. Those are things that are really critical for crime reduction. Apparently bikes are really a thing here (laughs). I think those are great initiatives that need to be continued.
We need to be a bit more engaged in the community itself. COVID has been a real challenge for that. Calls for service have dropped a bit and there hasn’t been as much workload that way, but the flip of that is you also haven’t been able to get out and engage with people in a safe way. I think with vaccination rates going up and where we seem to be headed as a province, a country and a world, I’m hopeful we’ll get back to being more engaged with the community.
[On] Highway 99, I know it’s a beautiful highway … but there are more deaths on that highway than there need to be in any year. A lot of times they were doing some of the math and trying to figure it out, and impaired driving is obviously a huge issue, but it’s not the biggest contributor to death on the roads—it’s distracted driving and speed. That’s an area we need to engage on as well.
Just given the nature of the community, as we start to engage more with the public, more of that backcountry style of policing would be a priority for me and getting a little more visibility in the backcountry. We also have deaths and [incidents] out there, unfortunately, and we can’t be everywhere at all times, but if we can get out into the area of the community as well and have a bit more visibility, maybe we can prevent a few things. Education on that is huge. We can do a better job on that and that’s something we’re going to be looking at doing as well.
One of the biggest things that’s happening right now, and we can see it in the world in general—and I see it as a priority for the [resort] but also for the RCMP as well—[is] there’s this context and conversation happening right now around what is the role of police in a society? What is that role? What is a police officer? What should they be doing? How do they provide services? What is the proper use of force—all these different questions.
Pique: One of the questions that has come up frequently in the past year centres on the role police should play on the frontlines of mental-health calls. Between 2000 and 2017, a CBC investigation found that 70 per cent of the people who died in police encounters across Canada struggled with mental-health issues, substance abuse or both. Your predecessor, Insp. Kara Triance, has advocated for trained nurses and social workers to be involved in these calls locally. What’s your take on that?
RD: I agree with Triance. We can’t be all things to all people. I wish that we were all expert-trained social workers in addition to being good police officers and being able to investigate crime … I agree that in critical incidents or in situations where someone’s safety is at risk, then we need to be first responders, but I can see us in the future working more closely with mental-health workers attending those calls with us in a team-based focus. They would have the skills and abilities to work with that person to communicate with them in a way so the social worker can totally understand what the circumstances are affecting that person and provide those supports and be there to provide the framework to ensure that everyone is safe. I think that’s where we probably need to go. But in the meantime, if we get a call for service, we’re going to go help that person. It doesn’t matter what it is. But when we talk about the change in society and the evolution of policing and such, I think you’re going to see in 10, 15 years down the road a much more partnership-based approach to some of these serious issues.
Pique: Don’t you think 10 to 15 years is too long to wait?
RD: Probably.
Pique: So what’s being done now to develop these relationships with local social workers and medical professionals?
RD: I know that from our perspective, as part of our strategic plan, in our partner-for-social-impact element that we’re looking at, there is an element in there about mental health initiatives … We’re kind of in that change period, what I call that paradigm shift, where there’s a massive amount of change happening and a massive rethink, so part of what I’d like to see happening in the next few years is to really engage with our mental health folks and look at some programs that we can actually implement that would see that joint response, or at least joint responsibility for these types of calls.
Our members are often, due to the nature of the work, faced with working with people who are often in crisis or are experiencing one of the worst days of their lives. Whether we are dealing with members of the community who are involved in committing crimes or breaking laws, or dealing with members of the community who need our help, we need to approach each person in the same way—with compassion. We need to let this [direct] the way we work with people in all circumstances in order to create a policing practice that is based on understanding people’s personal experiences, one that is fair to all, and one that is kind. This is foundational to effective and legitimate community-based policing in a modern society.
Pique: I wanted to ask about the Whistler RCMP’s media strategy. Getting timely information from police has been a challenge since Whistler was designated as a bilingual community last year, meaning press releases have to be translated into French before going out, which can sometimes take weeks. Is that something you want to improve upon?
RD: I know that one of the challenges in terms of communications, [was that former Whistler-Pemberton NCO] Staff Sgt. Paul Hayes got promoted and moved along … but that left a bit of a gap here. So we’ve been working on trying to fill that gap on an interim basis. We’re still waiting for that position to get filled full-time. We’ve got [acting Whistler-Pemberton NCO] Staff Sgt. [Sascha] Banks now acting in the role full-time. She’s got a lot of experience. I’m hoping with her being in this job and having my confidence that she’s going to be running the show in Whistler as the staff sergeant, she’s going to be taking that and moving it along.
I would like to see more communication with the media, because there are a lot of things we have to share. There’s information that we need to share to let you know what we’re doing, how successful we’re being and the accountability piece as well when we’re not successful on things. There’s nothing wrong with saying we weren’t successful.
Pique: How are police gearing up for post-pandemic life and what will surely be an influx of visitors?
RD: I don’t think we can sit back and say it’s not going to have an impact as we reopen. There’s a lot of pent-up anxiety and desire to get out and mingle with people again. We are creatures that need to be around other people. It’s what makes us happy. So we know the announcement was made [June 15] that travel within B.C. is going to be opened again, which means all the health zones are going to have the ability to move around, so I would expect we’re definitely going to see an increase in the number of calls for service that have been, over the last year and a bit, maybe not as high. We’re already starting to see a bit of that impact when they allowed recreational travel within [our] zone. There was an increase in calls this last weekend for Whistler, as an example. Squamish had the same thing; they’ve been getting busy for a while because as a community they are growing. But here we saw an increased number of calls. I think we’ve got the resources we need to be able to deal with it. We’re pretty well supported by the RMOW and we have various seasonal and other programs in place where we call in members on overtime to assist with, I guess you could call them surge-type events. So when you have a concert or a major event or on Friday and Saturdays, we have an ability already built into the way we do business to deal with those surges. Of course, if we need to adjust, we’ll adjust as we go. It’s going to be fun to see everyone out and about; it’s really exciting. And I’m going to be out on the road hopefully every once in a while checking on things … but I think we’ve got a good team in place and the support we need to deal with it.
