Stratford Police Chief Greg Skinner looks back at the Stratford Police Service’s crime statistics for 2021.
Looking back on 2021 and the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Stratford police Chief Greg Skinner says many of the issues that were exacerbated by the social isolation, fear and stress of year one of the pandemic also represented a big chunk of the calls for service last year.
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At a recent Stratford Police Services Board meeting, Stratford police presented a breakdown of crime statistics for 2021 and compared the numbers to those from 2020.
“Since the beginning of the pandemic, what we have seen is what I’m calling the big five calls for service that have increased over the course of the last two years,” Skinner said. “Mental health, addiction, homelessness, self harm including suicide, and family conflict and domestic violence.
” … So from a trend perspective, those are calls for service that we’re keeping an eye on. Our mental health calls, especially, have gone up incredibly.”
In Stratford, police responded to 728 calls for service related to mental health last year, while in 2020 that number was just 518. Similarly in St. Marys, mental-health calls also rose from 66 in 2020 to 99 in 2021, while in Perth South that number actually dropped slightly from 21 in 2020 to 17 this year.
“It is significant, but that can be a good news or a bad news story,” Skinner said. “Since we have implemented the mobile-crisis rapid-response-team model, which is the crisis-intervention social workers on patrol with officers, there has been an increase in calls for service related to mental health because people know that there are supports on the road that can provide them with assessments and guidance and referrals instead of having to go into an emergency room.
“So I think some of that increase is related to the increase in public trust that has happened.”
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While Skinner said it’s important not to downplay the negative impact social isolation, fear and division have played with respect to people’s mental health during the pandemic, he also noted that having crisis-intervention workers deployed with officers has served to help police more accurately classify calls for service as mental-health calls, which may also have boosted the number of mental-health calls this year.
Likely also related to the pressure put on people by the pandemic, the number of suicides and attempted suicides increased in Stratford from 23 in 2020 to 33 in 2021, while overdoses in the city more than doubled from 16 to 33 between 2020 and 2021.
“I don’t think I have to tell anybody that it has a significant impact on our resources and our community,” Skinner said.
In St. Marys however, suicides and suicide attempts decreased from 6 in 2020 to 2 this year, while overdoses decreased from five to three. Perth South, meanwhile, only recorded one overdose in 2021 and one in 2020, and there were no suicides or suicide attempts in the township this year.
Mischief and theft-from-motor-vehicle complaints increased in 2021. In Stratford, police responded to 276 mischief calls — up from 224 in 2020 — and 298 calls to investigate thefts from motor vehicles — way up from 173 in 2020.
St. Marys and Perth South saw more modest increases in those calls. Mischief calls in St. Marys increased from 35 to 44 between 2020 and 2021 and thefts from motor vehicles in the town rose from 28 to 32. In Perth South, mischief calls doubled from nine to 18 and thefts from motor vehicles rose from five to nine .
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“I myself have been fielding questions from members of the community about the numbers of vehicles that have been damaged and broken windows and things like that … in (Stratford’s) downtown core,” Skinner said, noting that the pandemic has played a role in each of those increases. “…None of these things are mutually exclusive. There’s all interdependencies going on that contribute to the picture.”
In Stratford, drug offenses actually decreased from 67 in 2020 to 43 in 2021, while impairment by alcohol rose from 27 to 37 and calls involving impairment by drug increased from five to nine. St. Marys saw an increase in drug offenses from four to five and an increase in alcohol-impairment offenses from six to nine, while calls involving impairment by alcohol in Perth South jumped from 10 to 18.
Skinner also pointed out that Perth South saw a big decrease in auto thefts last year, dropping from 25 in 2020 to 15 in 2021.
“Perth South geographically is different than St. Marys and Stratford. It is a more rural community, there isn’t a downtown core, and so it is a different style of policing and investigation and as a result there is a different type of police or criminal activity in Perth South than in Stratford and St. Marys ,” Skinner said.
“We had seen an increase in auto thefts in Perth South at the front end of the pandemic, particularly in relation to ATVs, snow machines, trailers and of course vehicles, and we’ve seen a decrease recently as a result of some of our activities and increased targeted patrols and visibility strategies that we’ve had in place.”
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While calls involving domestic violence and family disputes remained high, in Stratford they decreased from 539 in 2020 to 458 in 2021. In St. Marys, domestic calls also decreased slightly — from 159 in 2020 to 102 in 2021 — while in Perth South they remained steady at 26 in both years.
“We want to do everything possible to prevent these things before they happen,” Skinner said. “We don’t want to investigate domestic-violence incidents, we don’t want to have to involve ourselves in breaking up families, so the best opportunity we have in diminishing this type of call for service is education, awareness and support.
“So that’s what we’re trying to do. Establish partnerships with organizations that have that primary mandate to help women and children in crisis. ” … We certainly want to work with those organizations to be a partner at that table to diminish the impact.”
And Skinner said that notion of working with community partners and service providers to address issues like mental health and substance abuse, homelessness, and domestic violence is strategy the police service will continue to employ to reduce the number and frequency of those big five calls for service .