Alberta law enforcement agencies have joined forces to identify and take down the province’s top criminals.

Details of a new data system were announced on Friday. It is an initiative led by the RCMP that allows different police agencies in Alberta to share information about criminals with each other.

“The reality is criminals don’t care about borders,” said Supt. RCMP. Mike McCauley.

“They operate in different jurisdictions, harming communities across the province.”

The new system helped officers identify Alberta’s top 10,000 criminals — and arrest nearly 1,000 of them in a two-week period.

“That’s a pretty strong number,” McCauley said. “It would probably be around 1,200 in a full month normally. So it’s pretty substantial.”

The charges include serious crimes such as theft, robbery, drug trafficking, sex crimes and attempted murder.

Almost all of the offenders identified are repeat offenders, McCauley said.

“In each individual community, their crimes would not have marked them as priority offenders for that detachment,” McCauley said. “However, when we combined our data, we realized they were in the top 1,000 offenders in the province.”

In the Edmonton area alone, McCauley said the data helped execute 250 warrants and arrest 108 people, including four who were in the top 100 offenders.

“Forty-five offenders had two warrants each, with a total of 226 charges between the 90 warrants,” he said. “Nine offenders had three warrants each for a total of 76 charges … So we’re talking about people who are causing great harm to our communities.”

A similar operation will soon take place in Calgary and southern Alberta.

Participating officers cannot work on the initiative year-round, so plans are to have one or two large-scale operations each year.