Edmonton Police to close more community stations, expand online reporting

Edmonton police are about to announce a trade off. You’re going to see more community police stations close, in favour of you reporting crime from your computer at home.

“We’re looking at those community stations,” confirmed police chief Rod Knecht on Wednesday.

“We’re taking a hard look at community stations absolutely. We cut them back, what was it, two or three years ago? The public were okay with that. As long as we give a rationale and reasons for our decisions the public embraces that and supports us.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "We're taking a hard look at community stations absolutely. We cut them back, what was it, two or three years ago? The public were okay with that. As long as we give a rationale and reasons for our decisions the public embraces that and supports us."

Knecht said the trend seems to be when people have their garage or car broken into, or something stolen from their yard, they’re more willing to fill out forms online than drive downtown and pay for parking and go through the hassle of reporting in person.

READ MORE: Edmonton police launch online tool for reporting minor crimes

“We are going to add more on to the online reporting. We’re going to encourage more online reporting. We’re going to advertise and market more online reporting. Try to make it easier for the citizen and that’s what our citizen survey told us in February and March that people want more accessibility, less delay.

“They want to be able to report more things online so we’re definitely going in that direction. That’s the 21st century.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "They want to be able to report more things online so we're definitely going in that direction. That's the 21st century."

Knecht even thinks the advent of reporting from your computer at home, is behind the increase in statistics that were reported Wednesday by Statistics Canada.

“Some of that is on-line reporting is facilitating more reporting of crime, so that may contribute to the increase of our crime severity index and the appearance of crime overall.”

READ MORE: Edmonton police chief ‘not really surprised’ by surge in crime rates

Knecht hinted at the last police commission meeting that an announcement that not every one was going to be happy with was coming. He suspects the formal word on which stations will close will come in the next two to three weeks.

WATCH BELOW: For the first time in 12 years, police-reported crime in Canada has gone up and considerably so here in Alberta. Kendra Slugoski gets local reaction.

1:56 Alberta leads nationwide crime rate increase

With files from Scott Johnston, 630 CHED.