by Janet Smellie
Northern News Services

NNSL (Sep 12/97) - A former RCMP superintendent and long-serving inspector based in Yellowknife says there's "no excuse" for the RCMP not to conduct foot patrols in the downtown area of the city.

Lauren McKiel is critical about statements made recently by RCMP Staff Sgt. Dave Grundy that imply the alleys behind the Gold Range Hotel are too dangerous to patrol on foot.

Grundy's comments, printed in the Sept. 5 issue of Yellowknifer that "you don't go in there with just two guys or you'll be in trouble" is shocking, says McKiel, who between 1960 until the mid-1980s served with the RCMP in Yellowknife. "If that's an accurate quote I find it an amazing statement. Especially when we're dealing with youth," he says adding that for two RCMP armed with 9-mm weapons and mace, to fear for their safety is very alarming.

"My god, what kind of message is this to the citizens if the police are afraid to walk the downtown area."

McKiel, who first arrived in Yellowknife in the early 1960s, rose through the ranks until he became chief inspector. He not only went on regular foot patrols during his tenure, but as a superior, ensured they were routine for all officers.

He later transferred to Red Deer where, after serving as the district's superintendent, he retired to Yellowknife.

"I suggest that as far as police confrontations go, if you want a confrontation, take on a hard-rock miner," says McKiel about his early days patrolling the streets of Yellowknife.

But today, in McKiel's view and from his own experience downtown late at night, the majority of problems are associated with "kids wandering around at all hours."

"In my view it's imperative to be out there talking and getting to know these kids as we did all those years. As it is the police don't know these youth ... these kids perhaps lump all police in the same boat, where they have no respect for them."

McKiel adds: "No one with experience in the Edmonton or Calgary city police would argue against the fact that foot patrols help. In Red Deer (these patrols) really are a great help in preventing crime and apprehending crime in process ... especially if you have a concentrated area where the action seems to be -- and we have it."

Mary Anne Duchesne, a single mother who's raising her 16-year-old son while attending college at night, has spent 25 years in Yellowknife and agrees that RCMP should return to conducting these patrols.

"You can't tell me it's easy to flag down a cop when he's driving by in a vehicle and you're in trouble," Duchesne says.

Duchesne's son couldn't agree more with his mom. "They should have them, they've already got the RCMP outpost stations, but there usually empty. They could stage them from there. I think they're would be a real reduction in gang activities and vandalism, just having police walking around."

As far as McKiel knows, the RCMP stopped conducting foot patrols shortly after he transferred to Red Deer. "When I left my position of command in 1986 they couldn't wait for me to get out of town so they could stop foot patrols," he says.

"I'm not out to bash the mounted police where I worked for 35 and a half years. At the same time I've been in Yellowknife -- not continuously -- for 37 years and know the community really well and would really like, as a citizen and a grandfather, to see it as peaceable a place it once was."