(Supplied by ALERT)

By David Opinko

ALERT expanding Southern Alberta partnerships, focusing on drug trafficking

Aug 9, 2021 | 2:44 PM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – The last year has been one of change and growth for the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team (ALERT).

The organization has released its Annual Report for 2020-21 with a few key highlights including:

• Seizing $6.5 million worth of illegal drugs
• Seizing 98 illegal firearms
• 41% increase in online child exploitation arrests – partly due to doubling the Integrated Child Exploitation unit
• More than $7 million worth of stolen vehicles recovered

For the Lethbridge unit, ALERT was involved in 18 arrests with a total of 84 charges, the seizures of 14 firearms, and the confiscation of more than $91,000 worth of drugs and over $211,000 in the proceeds of crime.

Inspector Sean Boser, who is in charge of ALERT’s regional teams, says expanding their local partnerships has been a major highlight of the past year.

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These include arrangements with Lethbridge Police Service’s Crime Suppression Team, Taber Police Service, and Blood Tribe Police.

“You look at even the size of Edmonton and Calgary or even the RCMP as a provincial body, nobody can do it alone. We are consistently involved in multi-jurisdictional, multi-provincial investigations because the individuals we’re targeting have no boundaries,” says Boser.

“The Taber Police will have in-depth knowledge of the various targets within the small community of Taber, just like Blood Tribe within their policing jurisdiction and Lethbridge as well too, and the RCMP. It’s incredibly important that we work together and I don’t think we would have the success we have as an enforcement body without the integration.”

In Southern Alberta, drug trafficking and its related areas of crime continue to be among the biggest areas of priority for ALERT.

Of the aforementioned $211,000 in proceeds of crime, Boser notes that this number is significantly higher than comparable communities in Alberta, but about $150,000 of that came from a single significant file.

Another issue ALERT has been tackling is human trafficking.

“Human trafficking is connected to so many things and organized crime is one of them, and that’s our mandate is to tackle organized crime. To say it’s just in Lethbridge, that would be incorrect, but out of the working relationship we have with LPS and kind of what they’re working on with their own teams instead of having significant overlap, it’s about the efficiency on use of resources, so that was one area we thought we could focus a little more on.”

430 people currently work with ALERT including 376 who are directly funded by the organization and 54 that are from their partnering agencies.

ALERT has a total budget of $60.9 million with about two-thirds coming from the provincial government.

You can see the full ALERT Annual Report for 2020-21 below.