Rural crime watch goes digital

By Sean Feagan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

An area crime watch association has folded after 39 years, but a growing group online is picking up the slack by sharing suspicious activities in Wheatland County.
The Wheatland and District Rural Crime Watch Association acted as the local chapter of the Alberta Provincial Rural Crime Watch Association, a provincial organization touted as “the eyes and ears of the RCMP.”
Since March 1981, Wheatland and District Rural Crime Watch Association held monthly meetings and social events to confront rural crime through awareness, education and reporting. However, with an aging member group, declining meeting attendance and the rise of digital crime watching, its membership has decided to call it quits, said former group president Dorothy Bodeux.
“Members just aren’t coming out, so we decided rather than continuing on, we took a vote, and we all decided that it’s probably best just to put it by the wayside,” she said. “People just don’t want to come to meetings, they want that instant ‘look at my phone’ response.”
The group’s meetings were a chance for residents to build relationships with local law enforcement and learn from them, said Bodeux.
“We usually had our RCMP liaison, and at least one of the county Mounties would come,” she said. “You could ask them questions about different things going on, and they would keep you up on what they could tell us.”
With the group folding, crime watching throughout the county now relies on Wheatland District Rural Crime Watch and Suspicious Activities (WDRCW), a 587-member Facebook group that posts information related to suspected crime incidents “within the borders of Foothills County, Rocky View County (not including Calgary), Kneehill County, Newell County and Vulcan County … and includes all points in between.”
While Bodeux said she was “sad” about losing the meetings, she added the potential of this online crime watching group is undeniable.
“If we can get 500 people to read reports, rather than the 15 or 20 that show up to a meeting, it’s certainly better,” she said. “Plus it’s instant – every time somebody posts, I get an alarm on my phone.”
Though applying to the group is open to anyone with a Facebook account, applicants are required to answer three questions to apply, including whether they live or work in Wheatland County, are reviewed prior to approval, and the group itself is heavily moderated, said Sina Hen, who founded the group and is one of several of its administrators.
“We screen our membership, and we don’t allow unnecessary chatter or rumours,” said Hen.
While the group is active, typically with multiple posts per day, older residents of Wheatland County seem less keen to share their experiences on the platform, said Hen.
“Our farmers, being old-school, don’t share a lot of information,” she said. “They would sooner just phone the cops and deal with it themselves, than put it out there and open a can of worms.
“The only ones who seem to be coming through on the Facebook page are the younger people that aren’t scared of saying their car got broken into.”
But Hen encourages everyone to post anything suspicious to help fight crime throughout the county.
“People should not be scared of sharing suspicious activity within the group – we’re in this together,” she said.