In his 27 years with the RCMP, Brian Cumming has served in a wide variety of roles with Canada's national police force. From 2010 to this year, he worked as an analyst with the force's Adjudicative Services, which works to adjudicate and resolve complaints filed by members.
"I learned a lot in that job, but I wanted to come back to operational policing because that's what I joined the force for," Staff Sgt. Cumming said earlier this month.
Cumming, in fact, applied for a transfer to his current posting - Sea to SkyDetachment South Zone Commander - after 19 years of serving in the Lower Mainland, mostly based in North Vancouver. He longed to work in a smaller community, he said.
He started the new job on Sept. 10, taking over for S/Sgt. Guy Pollock after the former south zone commander retired from the force.
Cumming, who grew up in Vancouver, started his career in Bedford, Que., south of Montreal. He was next transferred to Ottawa, where he served for three years travelling around the country as part of the RCMP Musical Ride, a posting he described as "a PR [public relations] job more than a policing job."
Cumming's mother was a horse person, so the Musical Ride wasn't a complete departure for the young police officer.
"It's not for everybody -and it's not as glamorous as people might think," Cumming said. "There's a lot of physical labour involved, but the people are great and it's always welcomed no matter where it goes."
He transferred to North Vancouver in 1993 and for the next 17 years, served in a variety of both operational and administrative roles - general duty constable, the plainclothes section, and even a stint with the RCMP's Quality Assurance Section, which reviews the job being done by various detachments to ensure that best practices are followed and that officers undergo the training needed to do their jobs properly.
The Sea to Sky Detachment -of which Cumming is one of two zone commanders (the other being Whistler-based S/Sgt. Steve LeClair) - recently underwent a weeklong review conducted by RCMP Quality Assurance in November and "came out of it looking pretty good," Cumming said.
Cumming, 54, commands a complement of 28 officers in Squamish -the number fluctuates because of leaves of absence and such - and three on Bowen Island. The RCMP's Sea to Sky Traffic Section, which operates out of the Squamish detachment building at Highway 99 and Finch Drive, falls under a separate, Lower Mainland-based command.
In general, crime rates have been falling across the board in Squamish and throughout the Lower Mainland for the past couple of decades. Property crime is probably the key concern here and is the category Cumming most hopes to curb.
"Whistler being more of a tourist destination, it has a different type of activity that we have to deal with," he said. "In terms of crimes in Squamish, I think property crime would be at the top of the list.
"There's a lot of break-ins to vehicles -again, there's a bit of a tourist aspect to that because, for example, Shannon Falls has been a place where a lot of those sorts of crimes have happened. Then there's a lot of mountain bike thefts, which is part and parcel of Squamish being a mountain bike destination," he said, adding that increasingly, higher-end bikes are being stolen by people breaking into homes.
Efforts to curb the incidence of such crimes include identifying suspects in multiple incidents and trying to take them off the streets for as long as possible, Cumming said.
"In almost any jurisdiction, there's a very small number of people of who do a high percentage of the crimes and keep policemen employed," he said.
Cumming said he's hopeful that the recent reopening of the Community Policing Office on Cleveland Avenue will help keep crime stats trending downward. As well, he said, the RCMP's Officer In Charge in the corridor, Insp. Neil Cross, continues to work with municipal officials to ensure that Squamish taxpayers get maximum bang for their policing buck.
"I'm just happy to be in this community," Cumming said. "I've always wanted to work in a smaller place, rather than a big-city type of place. It's a growing town, very progressive, it's attracting good people and I just think it's going to be an enjoyable place to work."
