‘Everything is on the table,’ Fundy Shores, N.B., mayor says as communities question RCMP service

Police and Public Trust, a project of the CBC News Atlantic investigative unit, scrutinizes the largely off-limits police complaint and discipline systems across the region. Journalists are using access to information laws and, in some cases, court challenges to obtain discipline records and data.

Darrell Tidd kept hearing about break-ins in his community.

It was the summer of 2023, just a few months after the municipality of Eastern Charlotte was created in southwestern New Brunswick. 

This swath of Charlotte County runs from the west boundary of New River all the way to the ferry to Deer Island and includes St. George and Blacks Harbour — home to about 7,700 people, by Tidd’s estimate.

The municipality’s new government, including Tidd, the Ward 6 councillor, was hearing from residents whose camps were broken into. Tidd felt the RCMP response was inadequate.

“What’s at stake is nobody feels safe in their communities,” he said in an interview with CBC News from St. George. 

The province’s public safety crime dashboard shows crimes against people rising between 2018 and 2022. Crimes against property also went up.

At a council meeting in July 2023, Tidd made a motion: to look at dropping the RCMP and adopting an alternative. 

Eastern Charlotte wasn’t the only community expressing concern about the RCMP’s policing.

That July, the RCMP issued a statement warning residents against vigilantism after a car and home were burned on Deer Island. The island technically isn’t part of Eastern Charlotte, but many consider it part of the community, Tidd said.

Island residents told CBC at the time they were frustrated by crime, including thefts, that often happened at night after the ferry stopped running.

No Mountie is stationed on the island full time, which makes it difficult for an officer to respond quickly from the St. George detachment on the mainland.

Tidd worried something similar would happen in Eastern Charlotte.

“We don’t want to see vigilante justice and something drastic happen in this community,” he said. “That’s why we’re saying we need more community-based policing here.”

Those concerns were echoed by complaints members of the public made about the RCMP across all of New Brunswick from 2015 through 2022.

The most common complaint during those eight years was neglect of duty, representing half the more than 2,600 allegations in the data reviewed by CBC.

Overall, 50 per cent of the allegations in the database were found to be unsupported, a CBC analysis found.

Complaints from the public

Some allegations about neglect of duty were from people complaining the RCMP didn’t do a thorough investigation. Others were from people upset they called and no one phoned them back.

A complaint in 2016, found in the database sent to CBC, was from a person who called 911 in the Blackville area in central New Brunswick. Their reason for calling isn’t clear, but the person said they were told the RCMP would be dispatched.

“The RCMP never showed up and the complainant has not heard from the RCMP since,” says the complaint.

A complaint made in the Hampton detachment in 2018 described a person calling the RCMP five times to report thefts from vehicles and people looking in their vehicles.

“He has never seen a police car make a patrol in any of the reported incidents,” the data provided by the RCMP said. The complaint was informally resolved.

Another complaint in 2021, in the St. Stephen area, was found to be supported after a person complained that a constable failed to do a proper investigation by not obtaining or reviewing security camera footage.

The data was obtained through the access to information system as part of CBC’s ongoing Police and Public Trust project, which takes the public inside the often-opaque systems of police complaints and discipline across Atlantic Canada.

“As far as the percentage, it doesn’t surprise me,” Tidd said. “That would be probably in line with what we’re hearing in the community.”

‘Enough is enough’

Next door to Eastern Charlotte, Fundy Shores Mayor Denny Cogswell was dealing with similar issues. The new municipality covers about 370 square kilometres and includes Prince of Wales on the outskirts of Saint John and Pocologan farther west.

Cogswell estimated there were 10 to 12 break-ins this past spring in the New River and Pocologan areas, which had a population of more than 800 people as part of the Lepreau Parish in 2021, according to Statistics Canada.

“The community was getting frustrated and said enough is enough,” Cogswell said.

Conversations with the RCMP led to a public meeting last summer. Cogswell estimates more than 100 people attended.

The message from residents, he said, was that they wanted to see a greater police presence given the area’s vast territory. He believes it’s a managerial problem within the RCMP.

“It’s not the boots on the ground,” Cogswell said. “There’s just not enough of them. They’re doing the best they can with what they have, and I think something more has to be done politically and up the ladder.”

The RCMP fielded a number of questions at the meeting and residents left optimistic, Cogswell said. After another meeting in September with Kris Austin, the public safety minister at the time, Cogswell said he heard from residents who were seeing police patrolling the community. One woman said it was the first time she’d seen a police car in the 10 years she lived in New River.

According to the RCMP statistics, the Lepreau area has seen 307 occurrences to date this year, compared to 273 over the same period in 2023.

In Musquash, there have been 103 occurrences so far, up from 90 in the same period in 2023.

‘Everything’s on the table’ with policing, mayor says

Cogswell continues to be optimistic, but is still concerned by how long it could take for the RCMP to show up after a call. 

“Everything’s on the table,” he said. “We’ll do what needs to be done or what we can do within those boundaries, legal-wise, to protect the citizens of Fundy Shores. 

“I’m really hopeful that the RCMP will be the ones to do that, not only for costing-wise, but I think they can provide a good service if needed. But the problem is we’re just not seeing it as much as we should be.”

What an alternative might look like is unclear. The previous government ruled out creating a provincial police force to replace the RCMP, citing high costs.

WATCH | What we learned from eight years of complaints about the RCMP in New Brunswick:

Eight years’ worth of complaints about the New Brunswick RCMP show half fell into the category of neglect of duty.

The municipalities of Carleton North and Hartland pitched the provincial government on creating a western New Brunswick police force. It was rejected by the province earlier this year for a number of reasons, including cost and the challenge of hiring local officers.

Residents in Carleton North and Hartland were frustrated by similar issues as Eastern Charlotte and Fundy Shores: concerns about crime and the visibility of the RCMP for the $3 million combined the two municipalities were paying for the service.

RCMP leadership met with municipalities

Leadership within the New Brunswick RCMP met with several municipalities at a Union of the Municipalities meeting in Fredericton this fall. 

One of the RCMP’s takeaways from that meeting was that municipalities aren’t necessarily displeased with the RCMP officers on the ground. They just want to see more of them, according to RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Hans. Ouellette.

“We understand that there’s concern there and we actually, to be quite honest with you, I really appreciate that people have had these opinions because it means that people are actually interested in what the police are doing … and they’re concerned about public safety, which we are as well,” Ouellette said.

Fifty-one new front-line officers were promised for New Brunswick in 2023, and Ouellette said between 40 and 45 had been hired as of October.

With a growing population and lots of rural area to cover, it’s not possible for police to be everywhere at once, Ouellette said. That’s why the police use intelligence-led policing, where police rely on data analysis to make decisions on how to use its resources. Calls are also triaged, with priority on emergencies.

“We go to where the crime is,” Ouellette said. “So that’s very important for our communities to continue calling in suspicious activity.”

But at least one municipality has expressed concern about how quickly the RCMP responds to serious calls, too. The RCMP apologized to residents of Grand Lake last month, after taking 50 minutes to respond to a shooting that left a 75-year-old man seriously injured.

“There was a learning opportunity there for us,” Ouellette said.

Tensions have also flared between the RCMP and politicians over how the RCMP handles crime. In 2021, the province invoked a section of its policing contract with the RCMP to demand the removal of former RCMP assistant commissioner Larry Tremblay.

At the time, Ted Flemming, who was justice and public safety minister, expressed a lack of confidence in Tremblay’s ability to curb drug crime. Tremblay argued his removal was related to disagreements with the province’s vision on policing, which blurred “the lines between politics and policing.”

As the province grapples with a surge in the cost of housing that has driven an increase in homelessness, in conjunction with more demand for mental health and addiction services, police aren’t the only answer to dealing with the crime issues communities are facing.

A common concern across the province

Grand Bay-Westfield Mayor Brittany Merrifield has heard a similar tune from counterparts across the province who pay for RCMP service. She wants the RCMP to make more decisions based on the kilometres an officer must cover rather than the population of an area.

“This is a common theme when I talk to my colleagues across the province in terms of their feeling of the level of service that municipalities are receiving from their RCMP detachment, that that level of service has dropped over the years from the visibility of the officers to the response of the officers,” said Merrifield, the president of the Union of the Municipalities of New Brunswick.

“That sort of leads back to one of the things we hear about most is there’s a lack of accountability from the RCMP to the local councils, and this is an issue because the local councils are the ones that have the responsibility to provide public safety to their residents and we’re the ones that that pay the bill at the end of the day.”

Merrifield said that’s left some residents with a feeling of hopelessness. Why bother calling police if you feel your issue will fall low on the priority list?

“At the end of the day, public safety is about some of the small things as well as some of the big things,” she said.

Back in St. George, Tidd said he feels the RCMP are trying to respond to communities’ concerns.

He pointed to a recent survey circulated among municipalities on their perceptions and concerns about crime, as well as meetings with community leaders.

But he still questions whether the municipality is getting its money’s worth. He also wonders whether the RCMP are suited to community policing, with so many other priorities in a federal force.

The RCMP’s statistics show police were called for 268 occurrences, which can range from 911 calls to traffic stops, in St. George so far in 2024, down from 279 in the same period in 2023. Blacks Harbour has also seen a slight decrease: 155 so far this year, down from 169.

“When you’re not seeing a member within the community, when you’re paying $2.1 million for that service and when you’re calling and no one’s coming for two or three hours, that goes to prove the point that there isn’t a presence,” Tidd said.