The RCMP has had to help out the local quarantine officer “a handful of times” to “encourage the client to be compliant to the Act,” according to William Ng, Officer in Charge of the Richmond RCMP.
However, he explained at Tuesday’s Richmond COVID-19 Community Task Force, most people staying at the quarantine site in Richmond have been cooperative.
Anyone arriving from abroad is required to be quarantined for 14 days, according to orders from the federal government, in order to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
Overall, however, except for an uptick in fires early in the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to emergency services have been down in the City of Richmond during the first five months of the year.
Residential break-ins as well as auto theft have dropped over the past five months with the biggest drop in residential statistics. There were 47 break-ins in January and 55 in February, but this number dropped to 15 in May.
And Ng reported at the task force there was only one residential break-in in the past week in Richmond, however, there has been an uptick in bitcoin/ATM scams.
Auto theft has plummeted from a high of 30 in January to only two in May.
Commercial break-ins have continued to plague the city at about the same rate as earlier in the year, with the RCMP recording 32 in January, down slightly to 27 in May.
Commercial break-ins have targeted city centre storage lockers, Ng explained.
In April, there was a significant increase in fires in Richmond – 44 in 2020 compared to 31 in 2019 - but that number dropped to 36 in May, five per cent fewer than in the same month in 2019.
RCMP, fire and bylaw statistics and reports are normally given to Richmond city council at its monthly community safety meeting, but these meetings haven’t been held since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
