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Rural crime watch was the focus of one of the exhibitors at the Farm Progress Show.
Tucked away at a booth in a small corner, Nick Cornea was promoting Farmers Against Rural Crime, an organization that tries to help farmers know about crime in their area.
Farmers Against Rural Crime has a Facebook page that has more than 16,000 members.
Cornea also was consulted during the creation of the Saskatchewan Crime Watch Advisory Network app, which alerts users through text, email or a phone call from their closest RCMP detachment.
The app is a collaboration between a number of organizations in Saskatchewan, including the RCMP, the Saskatchewan government, the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities and the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association.
Cornea said that, while promoting Farmers Against Rural Crime, he encountered frustrated farmers who received either false or unimportant information from their own networks.
“There’s lots of rural crime watches that are popping up around rural Saskatchewan and Alberta and Manitoba lately,” Cornea said Friday. “The problem that people are having is that people use them for ‘Hey, my dog is missing’ or things like that and people kind of get annoyed with it.”
Under the Saskatchewan Crime Watch Advisory Network, alerts are sent out by the user’s nearest RCMP detachment, something which Cornea said provides real and accurate information to farmers.
“(The RCMP officers) take all the information for it, start the investigation and then they post it up,” said Cornea. “So it’s quite timely that it comes up.”
The most common rural items that are stolen are car batteries, tractor batteries and fuel. Cornea added that he has noticed an increase in the thefts of animals as well.
Cornea said he hasn’t heard anything but positive feedback about the Saskatchewan Crime Watch Advisory Network, which has more than 11,000 subscribers. He said the booth at the Farm Progress Show was popular with attendees.
“It’s growing and growing every day,” Cornea said of the system. “We get 50 to 100 people sign up every day. I’ve probably signed up close to 200 people here at the Farm Progress Show.”
The provincial government provided the RCMP with $50,000 in funding to launch the app. It began in southern Saskatchewan in March before being expanded to other areas of the province in April.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a corrected version of the story, noting the Saskatchewan Crime Watch Advisory Network is the app that is providing updates to residents in rural areas.