Property crime up, residents urged to report to police not social media

If you become the victim of a crime call police, not social media.

That was one of the many messages delivered by Vernon’s top cop as she revealed the second quarter crime statistics to Vernon city council.

“If something is happening in your neighborhood it’s not OK to just post on Facebook,” Supt. Shawna Baher said. She added she doesn’t have officers monitoring local social media sites where people often talk about crime taking place in their neighborhood.

“Just because it’s recorded on Facebook to a group of individuals, and usually results in a lot of comments it doesn’t mean that it is going to be captured by police,” she said.

Baher stressed reporting incidents to the RCMP is essential for police to determine which parts of the city are in need of more attention and resources.

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“It helps us to be able to tailor our police responses to those areas,” Baher said.

The latest statistics show a jump in property crime, which the RCMP say is attributed to an increase in reporting and a rise in theft for bicycles, propane tanks and thefts from vehicles.

“Our property crime has increased there’s no ifs ands or buts about it,” she said.

To combat the increase in property crime for items like bicycles, Baher told council that the Vernon North Okanagan RCMP recently implemented a bike bait program and the Garage 529 program which asks bike riders to register the serial number so a bike can be tracked if it’s stolen.

The two programs seem to be making a difference, according to Baher.

“At the beginning of the last quarter we were having a lot of bicycles stolen. We were high in bicycles but we weren’t finding them in Vernon. Now it seems like a lot of the bicycles that are getting stolen we are getting able to recover them back within a short amount of time — a vast majority of them,” she said.

Aside from reporting incidents, police recommend marking belongings with personal identification to make it easier for police to prove and recommend theft charges to the court.