RED DEER A DANGEROUS COMMUNITY

I am a citizen of Red Deer, and I have lived here for 20 years.

I was listening to the KG Country radio on June 16. I just caught the
end of a topic and a gentleman was saying that Red Deer is a safe
city; how he is raising his children here and has no worries.

Well, I was absolutely outraged by this comment. People need to stop
sticking their heads in the sand and admit we have a number of
serious problems.

Red Deer has become a very dangerous little city.

We have already had five murders - only three less than Edmonton - a
city of more than 800,000 people.

Now I think we need to open our eyes.

People are being murdered in Oriole Park, West Park and the downtown.
There are very few areas of Red Deer, if any, that have not been
affected by the violence and crime.

The downtown association of Red Deer is spending a lot of money
trying to beautify our downtown, but it will always be an ugly place
if we do not start cleaning up the drugs off the streets.

I was the general manager of the Buffalo Hotel for almost two years
and this is when I was first awakened to how ugly our beautiful
little city has become.

While I worked there, I had several encounters where I was forced to
call the RCMP. I feel the RCMP put all the blame onto the downtown
location and honestly did not help solve any of the problems.

I strongly believe Red Deer needs city police and lots of them. If
they start busting all the little people buying and selling drugs,
they will get rid of the big fish.

If you get rid of the drugs, you get rid of the prostitution which is
being committed mostly by minors.

I by no means have all the answers, but we, as a community, need to
do something. Action needs to be taken and some of these problems
need to be fixed before anyone can announce that Red Deer is a safe
city over the radio.

We need to admit it is not a safe city and do something about it.

Terry MacEachern

Red Deer