Superintendent Don McKenna's last day will be Friday. Photo by Curtis Galbraith.

By Curtis Galbraith

RCMP

Grande Prairie detachment boss retiring

May 13, 2019 | 6:27 PM

The head of the Grande Prairie RCMP detachment is retiring after a 30-year career in policing.

Superintendent Don McKenna’s last day will be Friday.

He says for many reasons, being stationed in Grande Prairie has been the highlight of his career.

“I’d say the number one reason is the people. Not just the people I get to work with (like) municipal employees (and) the members of the detachment, but also the people in Grande Prairie. If you look at Grande Prairie they have, how many, five Rotary Clubs. You have a lot of people that are invested in the community and that care.”

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He says he is most proud of working with and building relationships with non-governmental organizations during his time here.

“We look at things like combating the sex trade, because that’s basically human trafficking. How do we help those people? It’s not just the RCMP, working in a little silo, we’ll work with other groups to try to get people off the street. We’ll work with Project CARE to offer sex trade workers a way out.”

McKenna says the biggest thing they’ve done is worked to protect human dignity.

“If we look at crime statistics, how they’ve gone down. (In) 2014 and ’15, we were number one. I think in 2017 (on the Macleans magazine list), we were number 14, so we’ve fallen, but that didn’t take into account the growth in our population. Our population is almost 70,000 and the population they’re using is 63,000.”

An Inspector from the Western Alberta District office will fill in on an interim basis.