Catching Kids Being Good

Superintendent Ward Clapham, RCMP Officer

Positive Tickets, positivetickets.com

by Diane Selkirk

When an RCMP car pulls up near a group of teens in Richmond, the result is pretty predictable: young people start running toward it, and several swarm the car. Pretty soon the officers are talking with the kids and handing out tickets—tickets for wearing a bike helmet, or getting to school on time, or for helping out with a group of younger children.

The Richmond RCMP is six years into an innovative program that focuses on what Superintendent Ward Clapham calls “catching kids being good.” Clapham says his early years with the RCMP led him to think he was doing too little, too late. “Kids thought of us as the enemy; the people who arrested their parents.” His idea was to expand the focus of policing beyond just reacting, and to start developing the relationships that might keep kids from ever getting into trouble.

Positive Tickets grew out of this idea, and in Richmond, officers now give out 50,000 tickets a year to kids they catch doing the right thing. The result? A 41-per-cent drop in youth crime. “That’s 1,056 young people a year who never enter the criminal justice system,” Clapham explains.

Instead, those kids redeem their tickets for activities
that get them out into the community in a positive way. Thanks to partnerships with the City of Richmond and community businesses, ticketed kids can go swimming, skating, or even to a major sporting event, for free.

Clapham says some kids never redeem their tickets—they just hang them on their walls. “It means that much to them
for an officer to say they’re a good kid.”