REDWATER—Dwayne Spicer is out thousands of dollars after his gas station was broken into twice in four months.

But it’s not himself he worries about most. It’s the prospect of violence that some rural Albertans feel is brewing after having their homes and businesses broken into repeatedly over the last five years.

On Sept. 26, Spicer rushed to his Fas Gas in Redwater, an hour’s drive northeast of Edmonton, when its alarm system went off at 4:20 a.m. He arrived seven minutes later to find the front window smashed and the ATM machine gone — along with the suspects.

“I’m working 13-hour days right now trying to make ends meet, and then somebody like this comes along and yanks five grand out of your pocket,” Spicer said.

“Everything in the store here I make pennies off. Not dollars, I make pennies. You never recover from that.”

His window is still boarded up, and he’s waiting on insurance money to fix it. Police are still investigating. Meanwhile, Spicer lives in fear that he’ll be hit again and next time it will be worse.

“If I got down here in four minutes and caught them, what would have happened to me? I’m worried about my staff,” he said.

“Eventually the people get fed up, and then they start taking matters into their own hands. And that can be a scary situation. Criminals can get hurt and the rest of us don’t really mind that, but innocent people get hurt, too.”

Spicer mentions recent cases of Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley fatally shooting Colten Boushie, and Okotoks, Alta., farmer Edouard Maurice shooting and injuring trespasser Ryan Watson, as incidents he fears will be repeated in or near his home town.

“It leaves a lot of tension, a lot of fear,” he said.

Rural Albertans seem to agree that crime started to spike about five years ago, coinciding with the recession, and that it’s only gotten worse.

Redwater mayor Mel Smith helped launch a Citizens on Patrol group last summer after a local car dealership was broken into three times in two months.

Smith, who said his own farm has been robbed in the past, also worries about the prospect of violence, especially in light of changes the Alberta government introduced this week to protect property owners.

The province tabled Bill 27, the Trespass Statutes (Protecting Law-Abiding Property Owners) Amendment Act, on Tuesday. It significantly raises fines for trespassing and adds the possibility of a six-month jail sentence.

The bill will also make it harder to sue if a trespasser is injured or killed by someone protecting their property. To be sued, the property owner would have to be not only convicted of a crime, but also found to have acted wilfully and “grossly disproportionately” in the circumstances.

Smith doesn’t think that’s a good thing.

“I truly am surprised that we haven’t seen some deaths. Especially since the province has said you can defend yourselves,” he said. “I expect you’ll see more of it, probably more fatalities. It’s just the natural next step. People get fed up.”

Redwater’s 13-member patrol group goes out two volunteers at a time, cruising the town’s hushed streets at night on the lookout for criminals.

The crew drives a four-wheel drive Ford super cab equipped with flashlights, cameras and vests, thanks to generous donations from local businesses, including $2,500 from Tim Hortons. The truck itself was donated by an Alberta oil company.

Smith said the RCMP do a good job, but there are too few officers and they often can’t respond quickly enough. He said crime started to spike when oilfield and construction workers started losing jobs en masse and turning to crime to feed drug addictions.

“Typically where there’s a lot of employment and big dollars, that’s where the drugs come in,” Smith said. “We’re five miles away from Alberta’s industrial heartland where we’ve got refineries, we’ve got petrochemical plants, fertilizer plants.”

Alberta RCMP spokesperson Fraser Logan said drugs can be a driver, but motivations for crimes vary.

He said the number of officers differs region to region based on funding, adding calls where there is an “immediate threat to personal safety” always take first priority.

The patrol group has caught “suspicious” people on bikes in the middle of the night, checking locks and doors on local businesses, who flee when caught in the headlights.

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Smith said based on anecdotes and conversations with police, some thieves come from other rural areas, others from the city. Some, he admits, live right in town.

He said patrollers know where the local thieves live and will drive up and down past their houses, and sometimes park right out front to watch who comes in and out.

“We do know police have had complaints from some of the criminals that we’re harassing them,” Smith said. “That’s not a bad thing.”

He said he believes mental health and addiction are the main drivers of crime, but he doesn’t know what can be done to solve those issues. What he does know is the hamlet of 2,300 has seen a sudden rise in homelessness that coincides with the perceived influx of crime.

“In Redwater we’ve got people sleeping in tents and in boxes. Five years ago I would have laughed if anybody had told us that,” he said.

But while some are uneasy with what they see as vigilantism — even the owner of the Redwater dealership that inspired the patrol group said he opposed it, fearing it would increase violence — patrollers say non-violence is paramount to the work they do.

Garth Kohlsmith, president of the Citizens on Patrol Association, oversees the more than 80 groups that have cropped up across Alberta. He lays down the rules: Criminal background checks, only two patrollers at a time, no ride-alongs for friends or family. Patrollers are not to get out of their vehicles or engage anybody.

Trevor Tychkowsky is the director of the Smoky Lake Rural Crime Watch Association northeast of Edmonton, which has more than 500 members who communicate via Facebook. It functions more like a neighbourhood watch — people watch for suspicious activity, but they don’t go out looking for it.

Tychkowsky has some concerns about active patrol groups.

“I understand their frustration behind it. But the people really need to be letting RCMP know of criminal activity, and not taking it into their own hands,” he said.

Logan said both Citizens on Patrol and Rural Crime Watch are “critical” in helping RCMP prevent and solve crimes.

“They’re our eyes and our ears of policing in rural areas,” he said.

Having said that, Logan said he does question the residents’ assessment of worsening crime. The RCMP’s own numbers show year-to-date reports of break-and-enters are down six per cent from September 2018 to 2019. In the same time frame, thefts of vehicles declined 29 per cent and theft over and under $5,000 dropped 13 per cent, while possession of stolen goods rose 8 per cent.

Some rural Albertans say those numbers are meaningless, because people have simply lost faith in the justice system and stopped reporting to police. Alberta’s justice minister Doug Schweitzer has played into this assertion, saying officially documented crime numbers are “flat-out wrong.”

Schweitzer first announced the legislation on a ranch in Wetaskiwin, as part of a string of pending changes he said will deter rural crime. The town southeast of Edmonton is the Canadian municipality where crime is growing the fastest, according to Maclean’s magazine’s recent crime severity ranking.

Wetaskiwin’s mayor, Tyler Gandam, encourages people to get involved with groups like Citizens on Patrol, citing a shortage of police officers. But he ultimately sees the solution coming from social programs, treatment centres to address mental illness and addiction, and more jobs.

“I don’t think anybody wakes up in the morning one day and decides they’re going to start robbing people,” Gandam said. “I hope that it’s more survival, and less about just absolute bad people committing crimes.”

There is a general sense among rural residents and local lawmakers that the Alberta government’s new trespassing rules will do little to deter crime or help homeowners.

Gene Sobolewski, the mayor of Bonnyville near the Saskatchewan border, said he knows people who can’t even get insurance because they’ve been broken into so many times. He said the solution is a matter of keeping criminals in jail, and federal reform is key.

Unlike Gandam, he has little empathy for offenders.

“Some of these criminals, they’re carrying and have firearms in their possession,” he said. “That’s a scary, scary thought for somebody that’s out in rural Alberta whose next neighbour is a mile away, or in a small town like we are in.”

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