Fighting crime and helping the community is all in a day's work for the Squamish RCMP, but what does a year's worth of work look like for the local detachment?
Sea to Sky Squamish RCMP Staff Sgt. Gareth Bradley and Insp. Robert Dykstra presented their yearly review of statistics to the District of Squamish on March 25.
While some areas, such as violent crime, saw a decrease in 2024, others, like property crime and missing persons files, saw an uptick.
Property Crime
In 2024, property crime in Squamish saw a rise of 6.6% with a total of 1,181 crimes, up from 1108 in 2023.
“The [property crime] trend is increasing year over year. This is due to certain individuals who are in the community who are significantly committing the majority of the crime,” Bradley said.
“Several strategies have been utilized over the past year to drive down these crime stats. These include focused enforcement strategies on prolific offenders, extra patrols and investigative training. Many of these focused investigations have recovered stolen vehicles, workers' tools, large cargo trailers, bikes and much, much more.”
Vehicles and bikes were the two main items stolen from people's properties.
Violent crime
Over the year, Squamish saw a decrease in violent crime of 14.7%, with almost a 30% decrease in the number of intimate partner violence (domestic violence) calls for service.
“Throughout the year, we've had a serious shooting ... and we've had several high-profile interprovincial domestic violence investigations that are very time consuming,” Bradley said.
“Recently, we've [also] had a number of other police agencies, as everybody's aware, in Squamish, conducting serious investigations in 2025.”
Bradley said the shooting occurred in the fall of 2024, and resulted in an attempted murder investigation.
“A 49-year-old man was shot by his neighbour after a dispute. This was an isolated incident between the two parties, and a 34-year-old male was arrested at the time and taken into custody. This file is before the courts, and charges have been forwarded to Crown for charge approval,” he said.
Road safety
There were 295 road safety and vehicle crashes in 2024, which was down from 329 the previous year.
“Squamish has seen a 10% decrease in overall collisions, however, the severity of the collisions has increased significantly, by about 15%,” Bradley said.
On the multiple highway closures that occurred during the year, he said that the RCMP does everything they can to “find a way to open the highway and have traffic movement without compromising the evidence at the scene.”
“[However], the victims of these events, especially where there's a criminal element to it, they deserve nothing less than our best efforts. I think everybody would agree to this concept,” he said.
Youth crime
Over the past year, youth crime has significantly increased across town.
Around $42,000 worth of damage has been caused to people's homes, mainly by young locals kicking front doors.
“A small cohort of our youth have caused a significant amount of damage to people's homes, including several arsons, racist graffiti, significant damage to the local BMX track, golf course and much more,” Bradley said.
“This crime is highly under-reported because I see it on Facebook all the time, people complaining about their door being kicked and not calling the police. We really encourage people to call the police when this type of crime is happening, and we just wanted to highlight that the folks that are being targeted are not alone.”
Halloween has seen a significant spike in bad behaviour, but Bradley said residents can expect this year to be different.
“The last two Halloweens have also been chaotic, even with increased police presence. This year's Halloween is going to look a lot different. There will be many conversations with partner agencies, and many more police resources will be brought in to provide the necessary public safety that is needed in these areas.”
Missing persons files
In 2024, there were 33.9% more missing persons files, with 75 people reported missing, up from 56 in 2023.
“These require a large amount of resources, and we partner with our search and rescue teams to help assist us with the technical rescue of individuals. Often these files are in the backcountry where people are stuck or injured, so they require technical expertise,” Bradley said.
Of the total calls for service in 2024, the number remained similar to other years with 8,414 calls, up 1% from 8,314 in 2023.
Major investigations
Over the past year, there were two major Squamish Search and Rescue incidents, one of which involved three hikers who were reported missing in Garibaldi Provincial Park on May 31.
“The first involved the multi-month search for missing hikers on Mount Atwell. This was a highly specialized rescue mission involving our search and rescue team locally, our RCMP air services, Lower Mainland emergency response team and our integrated police dog team, which brought the search to conclusion in July of 2024,” Bradley said.
The bodies of the hikers were found over a month after they were reported missing.
“There was a significant amount of time invested in this, in bringing these people home to have closure for the family,” he said.
The second major file was a landslide at Lions Bay on Dec.14.
“This impacted many people and all the communities that use the Sea to Sky Highway. There were many technical aspects of having our police jurisdiction cut in half, and we're reviewing our business continuity plans in the coming weeks to ensure that plans are in place to move [officers] around,” Bradley said.
“We have several officers who live in the Lower Mainland who couldn't get to work and vice versa, they couldn't get home. So it caused a bit of an issue.
“There are several lessons learned from this event, and the criminal investigation is ongoing.”
Another significant investigation for the RCMP was when they were called to downtown Squamish in early spring 2024 after an impaired driver hit several people, including an infant in a baby stroller.
“This baby stroller became lodged into the bumper of a vehicle, which travelled many city blocks. It was a miracle that the infant was not seriously hurt, and many bystanders actually assisted in stopping this vehicle, so we're grateful to them,” Bradley said.
“A 30-year-old man has been arrested and has now been charged with two counts of impaired operation causing bodily harm, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle and failure to stop at the scene of an accident.”
Fraud, scams and awareness
An ongoing major investigation spearheaded by the RCMP’s plainclothes team involves a “significant international fraud that spans several different countries.”
“Those files get very exciting when we talk about going to different countries. Totalling over a million dollars, this investigation is ongoing, dealing with a local business in town,” Bradley said.
While fraud incidents dropped across Squamish by about 10%, Bradley said residents are still being subjected to a multitude of different scams.
“Several types of frauds were still prevalent, involving text messages, phishing scams, and emails. These are the most common ones that we're seeing in Squamish types that [say] 'Your account has been locked, please click this link.' There's [also] social media ads on discounted items. You know, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is,” he said.
“There's also the grandparent emergency scams, where someone is posing as a grandchild and calls the victim and pretends to have an emergency or needing some money to get out of jail for bail.”
He said with all of this in mind, the RCMP plans to host a fraud town hall later this year to raise awareness about scams and how people can stay safe.
What’s new in 2025
Moving into this year, the Squamish detachment has had an IT equipment boost.
“In 2025, as a detachment, we prioritised our investment in IT equipment over the past year, and we are pleased to announce that we have two drone operators—trained RCMP members—and a drone in the detachment,” Bradley said.
“[This] will provide valuable service for a number of different investigations, including our collisions and searching for missing people.
“Further to this, we also have body-worn cameras coming in the fall of 2025.”
Insp. Dykstra said one thing that remains the same, however—the Squamish RCMP are “your RCMP.”
“A couple of years ago, we started using the terminology, ‘your RCMP’ versus ‘the RCMP.’ It kind of stuck with people,” he said.
“The reason for that is when people would think about the RCMP, obviously, they think about us as a national organization and federal policing. We have a lot of roles that we perform throughout the country, but when it comes to the work that we do here in the community, it's very much community-focused and community-based policing services.
“So when it comes to the provision of those services, we actually provide them here, and therefore, as a result, we are your RCMP. We want everybody in the community to think about us that way.”
For more information on the Squamish RCMP statistics for 2024, visit the
