Drug investigations in Powell River spiked in 2024.
Statistics from the Powell River RCMP show drug investigations were up 85 per cent (37-2024, 20-2023) and trafficking investigations jumped 33 per cent year-to-year (12-2024, 9-2023).
Powell River RCMP Sgt. Graham Kerr said it’s due to changes at the provincial level.
“We had the change from decrim (decriminalization) to recrim (recriminalization) we’ll call it, in terms of use in the public so with that we responded to more of those investigations because the public was aware,” Kerr told city council April 1.
The B.C. government reversed a three-year pilot introduced in January 2023 to decriminalize adults carrying and using small amounts of drugs in public spaces. The program led to complaints about drug use at hospital sites and public parks. Ottawa approved the reversal in May 2024.
Kerr says officers also become more proactive in drug trafficking investigations.
“We had a few members who were very proactive in conducting various drug trafficking investigations and were very successful in their proactive work,” he said.
In one case during the last three months of last year, police made a traffic stop and found brass knuckles, 21 grams of fentanyl, 37 grams of crystal meth, seven grams of cocaine and drug paraphernalia used in trafficking.
Powell River Mounties answered 6,700 calls in 2024 – 4 per cent more than the previous year (6,443).
Outside of a couple of years where calls spiked in 2019 and 2021, overall calls for service have been steadily increasing since 2018.
Mayor Ron Woznow asked whether the calls involved a select number of people in the city.
“I would be confident in saying that a large percentage of some of our criminal files would fall within a certain group of people,” Kerr explained.
