“Complex social disorders,” such as mental health and homelessness, as well as property crimes helped drive a record number of calls to the Chatham-Kent Police Service in 2018, the organization’s chief has said.
During a presentation to the Rotary Club of Chatham last week, Gary Conn showed a graph displaying the changes in the number of calls for service since 2000. There were 65,144 calls last year, which was close to 10,000 more than in 2017, the graph showed.
That’s an average of 178 calls for service every 24 hours.
Conn said they’ve been on an upward trajectory over the last three years. About 20 per cent of calls are criminal in nature, while 75 to 80 per cent involve issues like mental health, poverty and addictions, he said in an interview following his talk.
These “primary risk factors” and property crimes have driven the increase in calls, he said.
“However, the property crimes, we realize, tie back into drugs, into addictions,” said Conn. “They’ll fence the property and take that cash and purchase narcotics with it.”
Although the number of calls “can have a real strain on resources,” Conn said they haven’t increased the number of frontline officers or support services staff. The police budget has only increased at about the rate of inflation, he said.
“However, we’ve been able to offset a lot of that with advancements in technologies,” he said. “Years ago, officers would respond to a call, then have to go back to headquarters, draft that report, submit the report and then go clear and then go back out on the road.”
Now, officers are equipped with mobile data terminals which allow them to “draft their reports basically from an office on wheels which keeps them on the street that much longer,” said Conn.
The chief said he’ll always consider increasing staff when he is finding it difficult to maintain “adequate and effective policing.”
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