No tent city in Dilkens’ new public safety plan
Windsor won’t resort to a tent city to house the homeless. Mayor Drew Dilkens stated that unequivocally Thursday after announcing a raft of new measures costing millions of dollars to deal with rapidly escalating problems associated with people living on the streets, many of them mentally ill or addicted to drugs. “That idea was never seriously being considered,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any appetite, certainly from myself as mayor, myself as a candidate, anyone on city council, to move in the direction of setting up a tent city.” The idea was raised at a meeting Wednesday among the city, police and health and social services agencies. Instead, calling public safety the first pillar of his re-election platform, Dilkens announced eight new measures costing a total of $4 million.
If he’s re-elected, he said, the city will spend $2 million to become one of the first municipalities in Canada to acquire the “next generation” of 911 emergency service. The system would allow residents to report crime by sending police text messages, video, photos and files in real time through an app.
“It’s instant communication with the police dispatch centre,” he said.
Officers sent to the scene could watch the video in their cruiser on the way and know how many people are involved and the appropriate response. Windsor would also become the first Canadian city to digitalize Neighbourhood Watch. Home monitoring systems with cameras that are part of an IP network can be linked to police.
When a crime occurs, police can target the area and send a message to everyone who is part of the network, requesting their video footage. If people agree to share their footage, it would automatically be uploaded to police. People could also share footage with neighbours.
There would be no extra cost, Dilkens said. The city has already contacted Ring, a global home security company owned by Amazon.
One hundred digital cameras feeding into the police dispatch centre would also be installed in public areas in the city that are prone to crime, especially downtown, where property crime has jumped almost 19 per cent. The cameras, which would cost a total of $1.5 million, would provide police “the ability to look at what’s going on in the city and to provide a ... response in real time,” he said. Windsor would also become the first in Ontario to adopt a safety program for pharmacies that stock narcotics, which make them targets for crime. The program includes building features that deter crime, time-delayed safes and using GPS to track drugs. The city will also “bolster” the police department’s drugs, intelligence, guns and surveillance unit, possibly adding more officers. The unit lost a provincial grant, and that’s had a “negative impact” on it, Dilkens said.
A new “community outreach patrol” composed of people from health and social services would be established to reach out to people living on the streets and “get them off the streets, into treatment, so they can get on with a productive life.”
The city has three outreach workers, two shared with Essex County. But “oftentimes, there’s a very haphazard, ad hoc approach to how these things are handled,” Dilkens said. He wants the city, police and agencies that offer needed services to work together more. The city won’t hire more people for these patrols until it assesses how effective they are, he said.
But, he added, “if the situation warrants hiring additional help, we will do that.” However, he said, the city could have 20 outreach workers, but if people can’t get timely access to mental-health care or addiction treatment, which is funded by the province, it doesn’t matter. “We need to make sure folks needing this treatment can get timely access,” he said.
The city and public health officials earlier this year announced a four-point strategy to deal with the opioid epidemic. Now, they’re waiting to learn how Premier Doug Ford will distribute almost $2 billion in funding for mental health and addictions.
And it’s not only opioids, Dilkens said.
“We’re also seeing a high incidence of cases of crystal meth, which is very concerning for us because crystal meth is a very cheap drug,” he said. “It’s a drug that’s highly addictive, and it’s a drug that actually changes brain chemistry and can actually cause mental-health issues.”
The city is also preparing to issue an expression of interest to developers to build affordable housing on a city-owned parking lot at Caron and University avenues.
“We want to make sure we maximize the number of units there,” Dilkens said, saying 4,700 people are waiting for affordable or public housing.
Rising house prices have benefitted some people, he said, “but on the very far end of that, there are folks who have been disadvantaged, folks at the lowest end of the spectrum in terms of wages.”
The city won’t provide an additional shelter, another idea broached at the meeting Wednesday. The Salvation Army, which the city funds, was full only five days out of the last 40, Dilkens said. Some people choose not to go there, and some have been kicked out for taking drugs or fighting, he said.
“I’m not sure that setting up another location and bringing police in to monitor folks who don’t want to follow an existing set of rules makes a lot of sense,” he said. Twenty-one per cent of homeless people in Windsor aren’t from here, according to the most recent survey. They arrived here in the last year. The city must provide adequate services, he said, but he also questioned whether that attracts more homeless people from elsewhere. “Will I ever get to solve the problem ... if we provide better services and you attract more people here?” he asked.
The economy, jobs and infrastructure remain major issues in the election, Dilkens said. “But if people don’t feel safe in their neighbourhoods, in their community, that causes concern through the whole city,” he said. “This is an issue ... that people see throughout the entire city, certainly very acutely downtown ... and they’re saying, ‘What are you doing and what are you going to do?’
“We talk to prospective employers all the time, and these types of things are mentioned, so it can’t be ignored.”