RCMP Chief Supt. Dyson Smith lays out policing challenges in the NWT

“We’ve also seen an increase in charges and convictions. So again, it it is certainly it’s a different approach from what we used to do. We used to work on great. Big time-consuming projects that, quite frankly, weren’t very fruitful at the end. We are seeing higher impact, higher results, and greater success from disruptive techniques.”

 – RCMP Chief Superintendent Dyson Smith

As the Northwest Territories continues to steal first place in the national crime severity index, the RCMP is working on strategies to curb criminality, and has a wish list that includes ankle monitoring, licence plate readers on highways and security screenings on regional flights.

G-Division Chief Superintendent Dyson Smith told a NWT Assembly committee that the biggest additional bang for the taxpayers’ crime buck, “If I had to pick, I would say probably personal monitoring would probably have the most significance for public safety on the ground at any given time.”

Smith provided an example of a recent arrest of an individual for sexual interference on a very young child at one of the parks in Yellowknife.

“That individual has been released by the courts, and we are monitoring that individual, but we don’t live in the house with them,” said Smith. “So, there is always a bona fide public safety risk when you’re reliant on a court document to provide conditions for them to comply with release conditions.

“We can’t be everywhere every time or all the time. So, in situations like that, there is a bona fide risk that somebody could be victimized, re-victimized, and that it’s not a pro-active; it’s again a re-active situation where we get called because something bad has happened again.”

Smith’s “close second” on his wish list would be highway monitoring abilities to help track what’s happening at these choke points for the territory.

He continued: “Because we know that vehicles being used for transporting drugs are sometimes stolen, or the license plates could just be stolen. So, if you had basically an early warning system … someone who’s wanted in another jurisdiction has crossed in, we can certainly set up an intercept, and that would be the kind of pro-active effort we’ve been looking for.”

Then there are the airports across the NWT that provide little to no screening of passengers before boarding an aircraft. That includes regional flights out of Yellowknife Airport. This while cross-border flights have the regular full Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) security procedures.

This has been a long known weak spot in preventing illegal drug, alcohol and weapons imports into smaller communities, which no level of government seems to be ready to tackle (some communities such as Fort Good Hope and Délįnę have to taken action.)

“We have, as we know, a challenging security approach when it comes to the airports in the in the North,” said Smith. We know that there have been instances, where people have driven to as far as Hay River or up to Yellowknife, and then of course they jump on planes to all parts unknown, without having to go through security.

“There are opportunities to tighten that up. It takes collaboration, though. Again, this isn’t a program that the RCMP owns, we are there to assist so that when drugs are detected, if guns are detected, if liquor is detected, we will come and seize.

“But it’s not ours to detect. We don’t have that authority at the airports.”

Smith reminded the lawmakers that under Transport Canada regulations, it is actually incumbent on the airline itself to be responsible and to ensure that nothing illegal goes on board.

As for crime stats, in 2025 83% of all calls for service could have been significantly reduced through better social programming, or mental health supports.

Of those calls, 17% dealt with mental health concerns, often just starting with a request for a well-being check.

Said Smith: “That doesn’t mean that that 17% is going to go away if all of a sudden Department of Health takes it over. There is always still going to be a need for the police to be at a lot of these calls because a lot of them involve suicidal ideologies, threats with weapons, threats with violence.

“We’re not trained health professionals. We’re police officers, so we don’t have the ability to make that determination that somebody who said they’re suicidal, that they really mean it, or if they’re just frustrated and need to talk to someone, maybe a week from now and they’ll be fine.”

In 2022, the Yukon Government and the Yukon RCMP launched a new Mobile Crisis Response Team in Whitehorse. The new unit, named Car 867, responds to calls for service related to mental health issues and suicide risks.

Car 867’s team is a police officer and a mental health nurse from the Yukon government’s Mental Wellness and Substance Use Services unit.
That program is being evaluated to see if it can be expanded to other jurisdictions.

“And that’s what makes those programs so beneficial because it doesn’t eliminate the need for the police, but it certainly reduces the time that the police may have to be involved,” said Smith.

“So, on average, and I’m saying on average because some of our calls are much longer in duration for mental health calls, but on average they’re about four hours long each with two officers involved for each because you can’t go alone.

“That equals about 3.4-years of police time being utilized per year on mental health calls, that is a significant amount of police resources and time being utilized for a program or for an area that you will see other programs and other jurisdictions that have taken a lot of that off the police’s shoulders.”

As for Canada Post, Smith said the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against random searches with police dogs. The officers must have a reasonable suspicion first.

“I’ve been working very hard with Canada Post over the last year. I don’t want to publicly say what improvements are coming because I really don’t want to allow people to know what those things are because I don’t want people to figure out ways to circumvent that.”

Said Chief Superintendent Smith: “So those are the Top-10. What you won’t see, if you’ll notice, in that Top-10, is nothing to do with drugs, so that’s just to show that, again, the drug problem is very high impact, and everybody is concerned and rightfully so. But it’s in such a low amount (of individual incidents) in the territory that it doesn’t even make the Top-10. But that doesn’t mean that it’s to be ignored, or to be discounted.”

Assistant Deputy Minister (Solicitor General) Jolene Saturnino spoke about programming behind bars:

“In 2025, 79% of the adults that we had in custody identified as Indigenous, and they were all offered the opportunity to participate in programming. Now, when somebody is in one of our facilities and they are on remand, which is in fact the majority of the individuals in our facilities, there is no mandate for those individuals to participate in programming.

“We do actively offer this to all all inmates in all of our all three of our facilities. It’s also important to highlight the therapeutic community that we’ve introduced in Hay River at South Mackenzie Correctional Centre (SMCC). This is a program that was developed with Indigenous Elders, and it is based on Indigenous ideology and cultural supports for for our offenders that are, as I had as I mentioned, majority Indigenous in the NWT, and we’ve seen some some great successes with this program. It’s currently under evaluation, and I believe that we anticipate that that that program evaluation is going to be available in 2027.

“We’ve been operating that program now for six years, and I think that when once we get that review and share that information publicly, that we’ll be able to see that there have been quite a lot of successes. We are currently looking at the program eligibility in an attempt to be able to move more individuals from North Slave Correctional Complex into the SMCC environment, and hoping that that will happen within the next year. It does require some security upgrades at the SMCC facility. So once that’s underway, we’ll be able to increase the population that we have there and provide those Indigenous cultural supports to those individuals.”