REGINA — Regina Police Service is making clear they are focused on investigating the weekend incident where items of RCMP equipment and clothing were stolen in the city.
Regina Police Chief Evan Bray told reporters Tuesday that “obviously we take that seriously.”
He said that any time police equipment like that goes missing, "when there’s a break and enter, when there’s and opportunity for it and it happens, it’s something we need to take seriously.”
Regina Police Service is currently investigating the theft of the RCMP items. According to police, the theft incident took place during the night of Aug. 27 and 28, when an individual or individuals entered a detached garage in the 3300 block of Green Moss Lane in Regina.
Because of the theft of firearms as well as police clothing, there is a particular urgency.
Bray said “when a piece of uniform goes missing, we’ve seen before in Canada that could be used for a bad purpose and we want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Bray noted that there are normally strict controls when it comes to police clothing. He noted that when police are discarding a piece of clothing that is no longer useful, patches are taken off the shoulders and there is a certain way to discard it to ensure the items can't fall into the hands of someone else.
As for whether it is routine for police clothing to be taken home, it depends on the unit they work in, Bray said.
He said that for Regina Police Service, their officers who conduct regular patrols have their uniforms and equipment stored at the police station and they have lockers where they can change, but other times officers that work in a specialty or investigative section who might be called out from home would have those items at home.
In this case, the RCMP firearms items were stored properly.
“It didn’t prevent them from being stolen but it wasn’t that they were not being stored properly,” said Bray. “Sometimes it’s hard in a break and enter situation to prevent absolutely everything from going missing.”
Police are investigating this “the way we would any other break and enter. They look for fingerprints, they look for nearby surveillance video, they work with sources they might have in the community to try and determine who committed this crime and see if we can get this stuff back.”
The investigation is still early, and Bray did not have any additional update to share with reporters at police headquarters beyond what is already known and made public.
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