Cop Corner: consider CPTED and stop littering

This edition of Cop Corner is partly educational and partly a rant from me.

First the educational component and for that I’d like to focus on what the police call Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED).

With spring upon us here are a few tips to take into consideration when planning both summer and yard projects.

• Install fences and natural barriers on your property. This can deter culprits from even entering your property. And if they do decide to try, they’ll have to enter via a more obvious path making them more susceptible to being seen/caught.
• Don’t post on social media that you’re going on a trip, and ask someone you trust to maintain your property while you’re away. The benefits of this are twofold. Your property gets looked after and it puts someone on your property from time to time giving the appearance that someone is home.
• Trim any bushes under your windows to create clear sightlines of your property. This will give you a natural surveillance to keep a better eye on your property from inside the house.
• Exterior doors should open outwards. This makes it much more difficult to ‘kick the door in’.  All exterior doors should also have deadbolt style locks.
• Speaking of locks, windows need them just as much as doors. And if you have a home alarm system, ensure the windows are wired into it.
• If your property is equipped with a gate, make it a habit to keep it closed at all times. If you keep it open when you’re home and closed only when you are away it advertises when nobody is home.
• Ensure your yard is well-lit. There are a number of good quality affordable lighting systems on the market. Take the time to do a bit of research to choose the one that will work best for your property.
• I highly recommend checking out this link to the RCMP’s CPTED YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcKXZtPXANcruAdyWOrXnHqQ3DdG_hcd7

And now for my rant and it has to do with littering.

This has to be one of the laziest most preventable crimes I’ve ever seen.

Now that the snow has melted there’s a lot of trash visible in the ditches and along walking paths.

I understand that sometimes a piece of debris may fly out of the box of a truck while en route to the dump or dumpsters, but what I’ve been seeing are clearly items tossed from the window of a moving vehicle such as fast food cups and containers and it’s very disheartening.

How hard it is to hang onto your trash until you get to your destination?

How hard is it to hang a grocery bag from the corner of your glove box for your trash?

As police officers, we often exercise discretion when dealing with a crime, but when it comes to littering, if I happen to catch anyone in the act, they can count on the $300 ticket that comes with it.

This Edition of Cop Corner is written & provided by S/Sgt. Sarah Parke of the Bonnyville RCMP Detachment.