WELLINGTON COUNTY– Wellington County OPP are reporting a drop in nearly all types of crime in 2020 based on the year-end detachment commanders report to the police services board.
Based on the report, assaults, break and enter and drug investigations have hit the lowest numbers reported over the past 10 years.
At Wednesday’s remote police services board meeting, Insp. Paul Richardson noted he was happy to see fraud investigations down compared to the previous few years.
He said this could be a result of successful education efforts alerting people to potential scams.
“We’re hoping to reduce that number even further with greater education as it pertains to fraud particularly as a number of frauds are targeted at our seniors,” Richardson said at the meeting. “If we continue to reduce the victimization of that community we’d be happy to do that.”
Nearly all other crime types also saw a dip in reported incidents however there were more than 42 additional domestic disputes compared to 2019.
In 2020 there were 452 domestic calls compared to 494 in 2019.
There were also slight increases in robbery, sexual assault and homicides calls last year.
Calls for service were significantly down with around 24,000 in 2020 compared to almost 32,000 in 2019.
After 2019 saw a huge increase in 911 calls–nearly 3,800 which were mostly attributed to accidental dials–emergency calls plummeted to around 560.
Richardson highlighted the Integrated Mobile Police And Crisis Team (IMPACT) which served 477 mental health calls in Wellington County and diverted almost 80 per cent of these calls from hospital visits.
“That means people are getting the right services, at the right place, at the right time,” Richardson said. “That means emergency rooms are not burdened when they’re trying to deal with COVID and other emergencies.”
The downward trend remained the same for traffic enforcement with speeding offences down by around 1,700 incidents.
Richardson told the board traffic in general has been reduced during COVID and he expects these numbers to rise as the province reopens.
He also presented some early statistics from their new BlackCat traffic data collection devices which were purchased in the fall.
These devices measure speed, follow distance, length of vehicle and traffic volume in both directions on a road.
He explained the Traffic Management Unit deploys these at sites where there are a lot of traffic complaints to decide if an area needs increased police enforcement.
The unit has used them in 21 studies which identified 12 problem areas, six each in South Wellington and Centre Wellington.
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