Community Safety Options

Update October 1st 2024: Here is local news coverage about this topic, resulting from the post below. https://www.midlandtoday.ca/local-news/midland-mayor-investigating-options-to-augment-public-safety-9597193

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As we head into fall from a busy summer in Midland, social media and the news has been buzzing about the continued safety concerns in our downtown core and in our neighbourhoods. Like virtually every small urban community in Canada, and to a lesser degree than the large cities, we have more visible homelessness, drug addiction and the exacerbated mental health disorders, petty crime that supports these issues as well as more serious crimes. These are not things that we can hide from the public eye and our limited capacity to deal with the root causes is now well-documented.

Housing, health care, the justice system and social services like shelters and all the other wide variety of supports and services are all matters for the County of Simcoe, the Province of Ontario and the Federal government – not your small town local government whose jurisdiction is basically land use planning, roads, sewers, clean drinking water, parks, sports and recreation, fire and police service… and with policing, we really only set high level priorities, hope the OPP can meet them and pay the bills regardless. Policing is complex, expensive and becomes the catch-all service when nobody knows what else to do with someone in distress.

The purpose of this post is to speak to community safety in general and what more we can do within our limited capacity as a lower tier municipality, tasked with the list of services I have identified above as within our jurisdiction and for which we pay for with the portion of your taxes that Midland gets to keep each year.

Policing consists of proactive patrols to deter and detect crime and responding to calls from the public about almost any kind of disorder in relation to persons or property, either in progress or after the fact. The latter consumes most of the efforts for police in our community since the sheer increase in call volume and wide variety of calls for help pull the limited resources away from proactive work to more reactive work, and the investigative effort that usually follows. We have no dedicated number of police officers guaranteed to be in Midland, and neither do the other four municipalities that Southern Georgian Bay OPP serves. Police resources are distributed throughout the five municipalities (Midland, Penetanguishene, Tiny, Tay and parts of Georgian Bay Township) based on manpower and calls for service. Midland, being the hub of North Simcoe, consumes far more policing than our neighbours so technically we cause their communities to be less served due to our heavy use. An aggravating factor is that the Province has had a longstanding moratorium that does not allow communities with OPP contracts to add dedicated police to their community – even when that community is willing to pay for that enhancement to their contract. I am over-simplifying a very complex topic but this is accurate and helps shape the discussion I want to have with you.

We are facing increased property crime, crimes of violence (even attempted homicides and homicides) and drug crimes. Poverty, addiction, mental health disorders often lead to homelessness and we are seeing more evidence of that in our community since the pandemic. Countless other communities our size are also experiencing this, but I am going to focus on us, since as your Mayor, this is my sole focus.

Property crime is often perpetrated by those feeding an addiction. The crimes are usually not well planned and are a crime of opportunity and can be dissuaded by police presence or increased chance of being caught – lighting, cameras, people around as witnesses etc. This is not always the case, but is usually true of petty property crimes. Proactive police patrols in areas or times of day where there is less likely to be any witnesses or people to intercede are effective but no police service, no matter how well-staffed, can be everywhere all the time.

People from CNCC are discharged into homelessness weekly and many choose to stay local. Even people from GBGH and Waypoint are not always housed when they are released. Why would someone come to Midland to experience homelessness? Beautiful town on the water, a hospital, a shelter with many services in our community for health & mental health, lots of options for drugs including a methadone clinic (which before you say it, we don’t control) etc… let’s add a probation and parole office and the list goes on. We have over 100 people in Midland (many are locals) experiencing homelessness and that number swells during the three nice seasons.

Not all crime originates from our homeless population, in fact I can assure you that the names I see in the press releases are all well-known to me from my past life in local law enforcement. There are a few exceptions, but the point I am trying to make is that the vast majority of crime in town is from people who call Midland home, many of them housed. Most are involved in the drug culture and the crime that flows from that.

Regardless of who is committing the crime, it is on the rise everywhere. This obvious fact is what brought about initiatives like Community Watch, Citizens on Patrol and other community-based programs where neighbours help neighbours and we all take more responsibility for the safety of our property and our community. In addition to this more analog old-fashioned approach to keeping an eye out for suspicious activity and reporting the details to police right away, newer approaches have been launched like CamSafe (a residential camera registry to help police know who has a camera and what it might have recorded) or SCRAM (a similar system for downtown merchants)

In addition to asking you if it makes sense to revive Community Watch and try to form a Citizens on Patrol program, I am exploring private security roving patrols to augment the OPP proactive patrols overnight and on weekends when the police resources are most strained.

I have no delusions about being able to solve deep-rooted societal issues such as the root causes of this epidemic of homelessness and drug addiction, but I believe our Town can try some new community safety approaches to help us manage the symptoms that impact the broader community while pressing for more supports from the upper tiers of government who actually have the funding and jurisdiction to manage all the other contributing factors.

I intend to explore all these options with our new OPP Detachment Board (all five mayors are members) and am working with our OPP Detachment commander now to scope out the framework for initiatives like private security patrols. I will have a better idea about costs to pilot this project in time for our budget discussions this winter. I am curious to know if you support the re-instatement of Neighbourhood Watch and the creation of Citizens on Patrol in our community. I’d like to be ready to explore all three of these initiatives with Council and the community at our next community safety town-hall meeting in early November.

What are your thoughts about this? Would you be willing to pay a bit more towards community safety on your tax bill? Would you be willing to learn more about volunteering to be involved in Neighbourhood Watch and/or Citizens on Patrol? Think about this and be prepared to weigh in as we get closer to the next Hope Housing and Health community safety symposium this November and the Town budget process next January.

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