You could see some High River RCMP members out at a function near you this summer and year.

As part of their annual performance plan the detachment will focus on some key issues this year.

Staff Sgt. Greg Wiebe explains the reasoning behind it.

"Our overall look at all these initiatives are to enhance community and the citizens safety, increase our visibility, detour criminality, proactively address crime and community safety issues and just allow for sharing of information and concerns of the citizens through that face-to-face interaction."

And that means hitting the streets and being there at your community functions.

"So, we're going to do some foot patrols, some bike patrols, we're going to try and up our attendance at community functions... so, we're more than happy to have someone reach out to the detachment if they have a function going on and they'd like police there, we'd like to be there too. You know, be visible and to be approachable."

They are also looking at cracking down on crime in a few different ways.

"We're going to do some enhanced shifts and basically that's just a shift in which we bring in a few additional resources we schedule for that. We'll go out and address some of our high-risk offenders if we have something like that in the area, we'll look to clean up some of our warrants and cover some traffic issues. One of the main traffic concerns is speeding in the community.  We are routinely getting complaints about speed on some of the streets in town. So, we're going to continue doing our school zone and playground zone patrols. We're also going to be doing some targeted enforcement this year. We're going to be looking at... doing seatbelts or distracted driving in addition to speeding and that includes our High River Traffic services which is an integrated unit of the office and the Peace Officers.

We also had a lot of talk about George Lane Park and areas like that were having some issues with some loitering and some mischief going on and it primarily relates to the youth. So, what we decided was to work on enhancing our relationships with the youth in the community... we're going to look at doing youth events and activities and so we're planning on doing at least five of those."

The High River RCMP will also be working more in a multi-branched approach with Peace Officers as well as the Fire Department in town.

"This year we looked at enhancing the visibility of the entire emergency services cadre for the town of High River including the Peace Officers, Police and Fire. And we're looking to promote meaningful collaboration between all the emergency services and that's going to provide us with that multi-faceted approach to community safety issues. Basically, we want to have the initiatives we picked we wanted to be interoperable between the emergency services within the community."

If you would like to reach out to have the High River RCMP involved at your event you can just call the administration line at 403-652-2357.