RCMP target open-air drug market to improve safety in Kelowna’s downtown core

RCMP successful Kelowna, B.C. person seized a important magnitude of drugs and arrested aggregate radical pursuing an cognition conducted by its Community Safety Unit.

“They established surveillance and they straight witnessed these cause transactions,” said Kelowna RCMP Cpl. Mike Gauthier.

The cognition targeted the open-air cause marketplace and netted what constabulary telephone a “significant” magnitude of drugs, perchance totalling thousands of lethal doses.

Police besides seized immoderate $27,000 successful cash.

The extremity of the cognition was to disrupt the merchantability of toxic drugs and make a safer downtown core, constabulary said.

“We person complaints from businesses, residents and those who unrecorded downtown, and that’s our response,” Gauthier said.

According to Gauthier, those arrested were targeting immoderate of the city’s astir susceptible residents surviving connected the streets battling cause addictions and suffering from intelligence wellness issues.

“It targets those who are preying connected the marginalized and street-entrenched individuals,” Gauthier said.

The president of the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce said she’s pleased to spot that benignant of RCMP action.

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“It’s a large start,” said Maryse Harvey.

Harvey added that drug-related transgression continues to instrumentality a toll connected businesses with break-ins, vandalism and nationalist mischief prompting immoderate concern owners to determination oregon telephone it quits.

“The interaction is significant. It is simply a precedence for the Chamber. It’s 1 of the topics we spent astir clip looking astatine and addressing,” Harvey told Global News.

She added that the solution has to beryllium multi-faceted with assorted organizations starring the complaint including the Chamber, the City of Kelowna, and the Downtown Kelowna Association.

“You know, the sky’s the bounds truly successful this region, increasing fast. Everything looks truthful promising, but the transgression is intelligibly a spot of a interruption to it and we privation to bash what we tin to code it,” Harvey said.

Gauthier said much operations of this quality are successful the works. Whether offenders enactment down bars is up to the tribunal system.

“It’ll instrumentality clip and sustained enforcement efforts, which we are committed to doing,” Gauthier said.