Williams Lake City Council is reaching out to business and community groups for a letter of support in Council’s position of reinstating GPS electronic monitoring of prolific offenders.
Mayor Walt Cobb says the initiative follows last week’s Council meeting in which the Executive Director of the Women’s Contact Society agreed to support the position.
“We thought that it’d probably be a good idea to help build our case if we’ve got community support before we go to Crown Counsel and talk about how we’re going to deal with this,” he says.
“So yes we’re getting a letter from the Women’s Contact Society and we got a letter from the Chamber of Commerce. Hopefully, we’ll get one from the BIA and anyone else who might be interested in helping us with our cause. I know that I have had an email from an individual who said if it was a dollar issue then he would go around and collect funds from different businesses and what not to help pay for it, so the community is behind us on this particular issue.”
Cobb says that the City’s Chief Administrative Officer, Milo MacDonald is currently in the process of setting up a meeting with Crown Counsel and the RCMP to see how they move forward.
“We don’t know what the real holdup is. From the way I understand it, the Crown has to ask for the monitoring to be done and then it is up to the judge to make the decision, and for whatever reason, it hasn’t been done,” he says.
“There is no reason why it can’t be used because the RCMP has a contract.”
Cobb says while Council had budgeted last year to have the monitoring done they were told by the head of the RCMP that they could not do that as the RCMP already had a contract.
“So that kind of fell by the wayside and in the meantime we’ve been continuing to try to get the process going so that we can have these prolific offenders monitored.”