The Weyburn Police Service is investigating two incidents of Break and Enter, both of which occurred last week on April 17th and 18th. One was to a downtown commercial building and the other was at a residence.

Deputy Chief Rod Stafford said they're still investigating, but some progress has been made in each case.

“I believe they were anticipating making an arrest and laying more charges with regards to the residential break-in,” he said.

For the commercial break-in, police have recovered most of the property and the WPS has laid two charges.

Stafford said it’s also possible the two B&Es are loosely related.

“The residential one still kind of technically remains unsolved, with a person of interest still out and about that we're looking for,” he said.

The common motivation behind such a crime is typically addictions.

“It could be you need money to pay the rent or make a payment on something and you try and get something you can sell quickly that will satisfy that debt,” he said. “But, when you look province-wide at break and enters, especially in the largest of the cities and that, they're pretty much exclusively to feed addictions.”

Since addictions are the cause of most break and enters, Stafford says it's not easy to help long-term addictions recovery or crime prevention in a catch-and-release criminal justice system.

“There is a significant issue, both on the mental health side, certainly on the criminal side, on the addictions side,” he said. “You would see a marked decline in those types of crimes if all of the stakeholders could deal with it on a holistic approach, but that's extremely difficult to do, I mean because first off the person has to be caught, secondly they have to agree.”

He said then, all of the ministries involved, health, addictions, justice, would need to have the kind of programming dollars available to deal with those things at that level, and currently that’s just not the case.

“If we ever get there, then I think we’ll make some significant in-roads into crime reduction,” he said.

In the meantime, the issues must be remedied at the family and community level, with individual accountability taking place prior to any desperate act of home invasion.