Jean Bota - Community Crime Prevention in Rural Canada

Jean Bota - ‘Building Capacity in Rural Crime Prevention Project

In our last episode, we talked about just one element of crime in rural Canada, intimate partner violence, with Pamela Cross of Luke’s Place.

She mentioned that in Ontario we have what’s called a Community Safety and Well-being plan. This is a framework for municipalities to utilize for their own communities. Four areas are highlighted as critical to success: social development, prevention, risk intervention, and incident response.

Jean Bota is the board chair for the Alberta Community Crime Prevention Association, a position she has held since 2016. She understood from first hand experience, as a rural Alberta resident and also as a former rural Alberta county councilor, that rural communities require a unique framework when it comes to crime prevention.

In this episode, Jean explains how the “Building Capacity in Rural Crime Prevention Project” came to pass, the pilot programs they ran in rural Alberta communities, the template that has been developed from those pilots and how you can access them for your own rural Canadian community.

Jean was raised in rural Alberta and is a third generation Albertan. She is a mom, a grandmother, and makes her home in Red Deer County, Alberta where she has lived for the past twenty-two years. 

Jean has always been very involved in her community, entering municipal politics in 2013.  She campaigned on “Safe communities and awareness through collaboration with law enforcement, community groups and citizens”.  Jean was re-elected in 2017 but lost in 2021 by two votes.

Jean has been involved with her local Rural Crime Watch Group for many years. She also chairs the Police Advisory Committee which initiated the Rural Red Deer Restorative Justice program.

You can connect with Jean here: [e-mail] 

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