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July 30, 2013
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Huskers blinded by the Sun
N E W S , S P O R T S , W E A T H E R & E N T E R T A I N M E N T chilliwacktimes.com
Mounties not getting their man
BY TYLER OLSEN tolsen@chilliwacktimes.com
L
ocal Mounties aren’t always getting their man—especially if that person is stealing a car or lighting a fire. The Chilliwack RCMP have some of the lowest clearance rates in British Columbia, according to numbers released Thursday by Statistics Canada. Chilliwack’s weighted clearance rate was 18.69 in 2012, down 17 per cent from the previous year. That ranked Chilliwack 159th out of 168
Chilliwack RCMP clearance rate among the lowest in province policing jurisdictions in British Columbia. While Chilliwack’s clearance rate is below average, it’s not an anomaly—almost every other RCMP-policed Lower Mainland community, including Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Maple Ridge and Langley had scores within a couple percentage points. RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Len
vanNieuwenhuizen said local Mounties will take a hard look at the numbers to figure out why they’re clearing fewer crimes. “We look at clearance rates very seriously and we always want to better that clearance rate,” vanNieuwenhuizen told the Times. “We’re going to have to sit down and analyze that,” he said of the increase. “It’s never usually just
one issue or reason. It’s usually a culmination of reasons.” The Upper Fraser Valley Regional Detachment is responsible for policing duties between Chilliwack and the Fraser Canyon. Clearance rates within that region varied. Rural Chilliwack, which is categorized separately from the city proper, saw a drop in the police clearance rate that left it ranked 139th. But the District of Kent, which is also policed by the Upper Fraser Valley Regional Detachment, boasted an above-average clearance rate and was ranked 40th
in the province. Violent crimes are solved at a faster rate than non-violent incidents—it is often difficult to find a witness to property crime. But Chilliwack’s clearance rate declined for both violent and non-violent crime. Certain property crimes have been especially difficult to solve. The number of arsons in the City of Chilliwack climbed 74 per cent in 2012, with 86 reported over the course of the year. But not a single See CRIME, Page 7
Gym at CSS taken down
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Beginning of the end as demolition of school starts BY CORNELIA NAYLOR cnaylor@chilliwacktimes.com
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An excavator pushes down one of the walls of the J.Y. Halcrow gymnasium at the old Chiliwack secondary school Monday.
See CSS GYM, Page 16
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hilliwack secondary school’s J.Y. Halcrow Gymnasium is no more. The old gym, once affectionately known as the old airplane hangar, was demolished Monday to be replaced by a suite of stateof-the-art athletic facilities at the new high school, scheduled to open this September. In a matter of hours, one big excavator had reduced a good bit of history to a pile of bricks, wood and twisted metal. The gym was opened in 1952, two years after construction on the rest of the school was complete. Lore has it the gym’s shell was a repurposed Second World War airplane hangar used to repair British and Canadian fighter planes in Vancouver during the war. And the gym’s original horse-hair floor (identical to one installed in UBC’s War
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