Police crack down on crime in core
Windsor officers make 82 Arrests in month in High-visibility move
Windsor police have arrested more than 80 people downtown within a month as they “restructure” and increase patrols to curb the tide of crime and addiction plaguing the city’s core.
Eight of those people were hiding out in Windsor after fleeing other jurisdictions where they were wanted for crimes.
“It has been very effective, and it has sent the message that if you’re hiding here we will find you and you will be sent back,” said Deputy Chief Brad Hill.
“Those that thought they had run from their charges and could hide from it were returned. “They can’t hide any longer.” The Problem Oriented Policing unit made 82 arrests downtown between Oct. 8 and Nov. 6. Police executed 29 arrest warrants, which included the eight people returned to other jurisdictions. Officers laid more than 125 criminal code and drug charges in that time frame. Hill said there was a total of 308 downtown “interactions” between police and the public, including arrests and tickets. Chief Al Frederick said the increased presence downtown includes foot, bicycle and car patrols along with plainclothes officers. “We have to recommit ourselves as an organization to those strategies that we can develop and deploy that are effective,” he said. “We’re seeing that right now. We’re seeing the effectiveness. We’re hearing the feedback loud and clear from the BIA, the boards of education, residents in the downtown core. They want to see the high visibility. They’re seeing that.”
Mayor Drew Dilkens said the police services board will ask city council for a 6.4-per-cent budget increase, partly to hire more officers to combat the problems downtown and increasing call volumes in general.
If the request is approved, the police budget will jump from $83,943,525 this year to $89,292,971 in 2019. The bulk of the increase would be taken up by contractual salary increases. About $1 million would be for equipment replacement.
But $2.8 million would go toward hiring 24 new officers in two stages. “I think the public expects us to provide proper public safety,” said Dilkens, also chairman of the police services board. “We’re doing that and we’re going to respond to what we’re seeing in our community. It’s not something that we can ignore.”
Dilkens said the first 12 officers, for the Problem Oriented Policing Unit, are being hired “directly in response to issues that we were seeing in our downtown core.” But he added those officers will also move to other areas around the city when a “targeted response” is needed. Frederick said the first group of 12 officers will likely be hired by the middle of 2019.
The second round of hiring still needs city council approval. If that happens, Frederick said those officers will be on the streets by late 2019 or early 2020.
“In the meantime, we’ve restructured our organization to put additional resources into the downtown core right now,” he said. “So there are considerable resources there as we speak. It’s not like we have to wait for anything to occur in regard to that hiring. It’s a bit of a shell game right now but we’re putting our resources where they’re needed, and that’s downtown.”
Phog Lounge owner Tom Lucier, who has been a loud critic of the police response to downtown crime, said he can live with that. “There’s going to be a lag time from the time they hire those guys, train them and then there are more officers,” he said.
“I can be patient. My issue isn’t solve it right now. It’s tell me there’s going to be something changing or that there’s been an adjustment, and there has been.” Lucier, who even took to patrolling streets late at night with fellow bar owners, said he recently received a call from police to talk about what the service is doing. He called it a “very satisfying conversation that was clearly not lip service.”
“I’m much happier now because they’re out there grabbing guys and sending them away,” continued Lucier.
“The terminology he used was these are good arrests. They’re not just like this guy took a bike. It’s like these guys have lots of drugs on them, and they have other peoples’ property on them, and they breached a recognizance multiple times. These are people we want to catch and we’ve done that.”