‘Beyond shocking’: Kelowna mayor appalled by number of criminals at large waiting to be charged

When RCMP officials present local councils with crime statistics they amount to reams of numbers listing calls, petty crimes, traffic tickets, serious crimes and more.

But, for the first time ever, Kelowna City Council heard some different kinds of numbers today, Feb. 28.

“This is the first time council’s heard these numbers,” Mayor Colin Basran said. “It’s beyond shocking and it’s appalling.”

Those numbers are the 80% of files from 2021 that Kelowna RCMP sent to the B.C. Prosecution Service asking for charges to be laid that have yet to come back to them with any ruling.

"If you have that number of files waiting, you’re going to have offenders who are at large in the community during a period of time when they’re waiting for court and, we can assume from patterns of behaviour we have seen with persistent and prolific offenders, they are committing more crime while at large in the community,” Kelowna RCMP's top cop Supt. Kara Triance told council.

Out of 1,084 property crime files sent to Crown last year, she’s still waiting to hear back on 884, or 78%.

Of the total 3,358 charges that were forwarded, including violent crimes, she’s waiting for an assessment on 2,675, or 80%.

When local RCMP hear back from the prosecution service, they have a 90% success rate of getting a charge approved, compared to 83% for the rest of the province.

The problem doesn’t lie with the Crown prosecutors themselves, Triance stressed. They are working flat out. It’s just that there’s not enough of them to keep up with the work load.

Basran said the city needs to make lobbying the province on this issue a high priority.

Councillor Brand Sieben pointed out that, if more charges are laid, there’s going to be downstream impacts that also have to be considered in the bigger picture, like court time, jails and social services.

City staff will come back with some options for council on how best to move on this issue.

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