Downtown Crime

[northlands]

So, is he against having a downtown police presence here?

I feel this sort of article is just misleading click bait, typical of the columnist and the publication. No mention of how COVID and WFH decimated downtown business, so that might have more to do with why they or others closed.
I suppose as usual, Gunter has an agenda and he doesn't let a broader discussion of the situation get in the way of his arguments.

I honestly don’t think he has much of an agenda aside from posting incendiary content that riles up his target audience (conservative boomer suburbanites & rural folks) for comments & clicks.

When was the last time he wrote an opinion piece praising anything about City Council, the City of Edmonton as an organization, or downtown Edmonton? I’m guessing sometime between when Bill Smith was last in office and never

 

[Gronk!]

Hahaha oh boy.

GUNTER: It is so bad Downtown they're turning cafés into transit police stations

These repurposed uses are being made possible through a provincial grant of $5 million to make transit in our city safer.

edmontonsun.com

Retire, you old git!

 

[David A]

I honestly don’t think he has much of an agenda aside from posting incendiary content that riles up his target audience (conservative boomer suburbanites & rural folks) for comments & clicks.

When was the last time he wrote an opinion piece praising anything about City Council, the City of Edmonton as an organization, or downtown Edmonton? I’m guessing sometime between when Bill Smith was last in office and never

I feel his target audience is the poorly informed and he does what he can to ensure they remain that.

 

[archited]

Another hard-right conservative whose eyes are being burned out by the dying embers.

 

[Gronk!]

From the other side of the river

'Break-ins, robberies': Whyte Ave businesses ask for more police, money for broken windows

Fed up with violence, theft and shattered glass, a group of business owners in one of Edmonton's signature neighbourhoods is making a public plea for help.

edmonton.ctvnews.ca

 

[thommyjo]

Pretty intense response from 6500+ people who did the public spaces survey. dark red is "extremely concerned" vs "very concerned" for lighter red.

 

[IanO]

Northern Chicken
@northchickenyeg
To who ever the jackass that smashed our window at #nc104 tonight... We hope you have a horrible life.... Goddamn it, businesses need to catch a break.

 

[Greenspace]

^Which is why we have the window repair program, which has now been extended to residential buildings dt as well as all BIAs.

 

[IanO]

Which is fantastic and will help take the burden off of the business owner, but still not addressing the root issues.

 

[The_Cat]

I saw one homeless person crossing illegally at a light. I told him to stop but he wouldn’t listen. He almost got hit.

 

[Greenspace]

What are the root issues? It seems every city dealing with the same rise of vandalism and violent incidents.

London Drugs considers closing stores in Downtown Vancouver, Nanaimo and Kamloops due to theft and rising cases of violent incidents.

 

[IanO]

Broken windows, tagging and vandalism will always be around, but it has been at a frequency and quantity that must be curtailed as part of the broader campaign to reign in those who choose to take advantage of public and private property without fear or reprisal or accountability for ones actions.

 

[David A]

Northern Chicken
@northchickenyeg
To who ever the jackass that smashed our window at #nc104 tonight... We hope you have a horrible life.... Goddamn it, businesses need to catch a break.

If it is any consolation, they probably already do have a horrible life. Unfortunately, bad things are like a virus and seem to spread around and around.

Sadly, people who bear the brunt of this are people with retail or street facing businesses. Our governments need to do more to address the problems that lead to this.

 

[Kosy123]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/policing-in-core-pushing-crime-to-other-parts-of-edmonton-police-inspector-says-1.7003663

 

[erudyk_29]

Edmonton is consistently plagued by band-aid solutions in pretty much every aspect of government. It's politically risky to spend the money to solve these problems at their root cause and so nobody actually wants to take the potential political hit to make these things happen. As we see here, increased police presence downtown has just led to crime moving around. It's the same thing with removing homeless encampments, all you do is move the problem to a different area of the city. The issue still exists since there has been nothing done to attack the problem at the root. In this case, an opioid crisis and an increasingly desperate homelessness problem. Increasing police presence is like taking an advil for a brain tumor.

Unless governments step up and provide high quality social services and shelters, homelessness and crime will continue to be a problem in Edmonton.