Council got a run down of just what police do to protect the public in Burlington

By Pepper Parr

February 3rd, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

Part one of a two-part series

Superintendent Dave Costantini  from police district number three, which is the Burlington detachment started the presentation that explained what the police do on a day to day basis.

He opened by saying that the credit for good work done belonged to Superintendent Sue Biggs, who’s gone on to other things at headquarters,

The police officers that take care of Burlington.

Inspector Dwayne Perron delivered the presentation. Introducing the rest of the team he added that manager of our Criminal Investigations Bureau is Detective Sergeant Derek Moyes; Manager of Community Mobilization is Chris Clarke. Team leader of the District response unit is Sergeant John Edolls.

Constable Sarah Rudall does a lot of outreach within the community.

At the moment, there’s some promotional processes, so command of three district may or may not change. When that happens, we should know in the next week or two when that happens

Inspector Dwayne Perron: “It was 23 short years ago that I started my career here in Burlington, actually just down the street on Locust where the police station used to be located.

“I arrived back in Burlington last year as the Operations Inspector. My goal is to provide an overview of some of the work were done in Burlington.

“I want to highlight some of the challenges that might propel us into 2025 and some things that we are looking to do and try to accomplish, some of which will probably come as no surprise to each of you.

“I’m going to talk a lot about collaboration, because we know that we can’t do this alone. We have a community that is very supportive of our police service. Last year, we attended seven different public town halls.  I have promised transparency

“You heard Superintendent Costantini talk about our Criminal Investigation Bureau as well as our District Response unit and our Community Mobilization Bureau.

“Focusing on the District  Community Mobilization Bureau, they are the ones that are boots on the ground that are in all the meetings and are working directly with their community.

“We try to do that through what we call a CSWB lens – Community Safety and Well Being. We don’t look at something from a police perspective or an enforcement perspective, but we try to look at the underlying root causes of what exactly is happening because it may not necessarily always be just a police matter. We may be just one small slice of the pie.

“An example I can give you is Reimer common, a small townhouse complex just off of Queensway Boulevard. Early last year we had some challenges that were based on different mental health challenges as well as drug addictions that was causing a lot of calls to our community that were affecting all of the residents in that area.

“Our Community Mobilization Bureau then partnered with our Criminal Investigation Bureau, and they tackled this through a CSWB lens.

“They looked at foot traffic that resulted in the setting up of fences, which enabled us to slow down some of the challenges that we are facing.

“We also tackled it from an enforcement lens to understand, is there something that we are missing that we can do to try to help the residents that are living in that area, to make sure that at the end of the day, that they feel safe?

“We faced some challenges at the GO station in Burlington in terms of individuals staying there overnight which resulted in some petty crime and some mental health challenges that were affecting our community.

“Working with them we were you able to come up with a compromise and a solution that met exactly what we’re trying to achieve.

Homeless people were gathering at the Burlington GO station.

“Our team does a lot of outreach for our unhoused.  Every Thursday they partner up and go out with Halton Housing; they actually go out and they meet those individuals that are facing challenges and trying to provide resources and outreach to find out if there’s anything that we can do, or at least connect them to those that have the potential solutions for them to get them off of the streets,

“It would be easy for an officer to go out and just do random traffic enforcement -we try to shy away from that. We try to make all of the business that we do, whether that’s traffic enforcement or criminal investigations, based on intelligence led so that we are not only receiving information from the public by way of traffic complaints, which I know we had approximately 2,500 last year, but those are the ones that are greatly impacting our citizens. By using our collisions data and determining where the accidents actually happening we can really direct and focus our enforcement

“In the rural areas, the issue is not the amount of traffic but the speeding.

“The ultimate goal is not about trying to issue a ticket to an individual. It’s trying to prevent deaths and serious injuries from happening on our roadways.

The traffic enforcement we’ve been able to accomplish with our strategic policing, is aggressive driving, or careless and distracted driving.

“Last year, just to provide some context, our district response team, arrested 131 individuals for impaired driving.

“The District Response Team, in terms of distracted driving, laid 176 different charges.

“Project noise maker. We do receive a lot of complaints about the level of noise This issued 386 offenses – loud, noisy mufflers, which causes not only issues the environment, but also causes challenges for our residents who are living in the downtown core and trying to be able to sleep at night.

“I want to talk about some crime trends. There are three types of crimes that are the most prevalent in Burlington. Auto theft – we are facing an epidemic. Last year in Burlington, we had a total of 431 vehicles stolen, which is a significant number for us. Believe it or not, it’s actually down from the year before.

“We built a regional task force that operated in the city of Burlington. It was a pilot program that we started to try to focus all of our enforcement efforts on auto theft, and not just auto theft as a singular crime, but organized crime as a whole because we know that auto theft is directly connected to organized crime. That pilot was so successful, not only in terms of arrests but in reducing the number of vehicles that we had stolen, and as a result, we’re able to now move that forward as a full-time team as part of the hall Regional Police.