Duane Hicks
OPP Commissioner Christopher D. Lewis wants a greater emphasis on crime prevention in future.
Named the successor to Julian Fantino last summer, and officially starting the job Aug. 1, the Sault Ste. Marie native dropped by the Fort Frances detachment last Wednesday to visit with officers, members of town council, and the local Police Services Board.
Commissioner Lewis said he isn’t looking at “a whole pile of changes” during his four-year term, but more crime prevention is a definite goal.
“Not that other commissioners didn’t care about prevention, but over the years I think we’ve all found that preventing crime is a lot more effective way of dealing with crime than investigating, prosecuting, and jailing people for crimes,” he remarked.
“Every penny you can spend on prevention . . . means somebody wasn’t victimized.
“Having said that, we only have so many resources,” Commissioner Lewis conceded. “If I could have a million people like [local OPP Community Services Officer Cst. Anne McCoy] doing what Anne does out there, that would be great.
“But we still have to staff cars, answer calls for service, patrols communities, and do all that.
“It’s about finding the right balance and investing in the right way,” he reasoned
Commissioner Lewis said it’s unfortunate that when times are tough, municipalities sometimes look at cutting back on community policing.
“That’s the last thing in the world I want to do,” he stressed. “If we’re going to cut anything, I don’t want to cut the preventative stuff—I’d like to invest more in prevention.
“But the reality is, we still have to have ‘x’ number of cars out there for officer safety issues and patrolling communities.”
Commissioner Lewis passed through Fort Frances as part of a tour of the North West Region last week.
“We’re just visiting our people in the northwest,” he noted. “It’s so far away from our headquarters [in Orillia] that I don’t get here often enough.
“I have a real close bond with Northern Ontario, being from Northern Ontario myself.
“My heart’s always been in Northern Ontario, so for me to get [out] and meet our people and listen to some of the things they have to say . . . that’s important to me,” Commissioner Lewis added, saying he just wants to be sure “everybody’s happy with the way the OPP’s operating, and that they’re happy with what I am doing to lead the OPP.”
Having with the Police Services Board and council, Commissioner Lewis said they expressed “satisfaction with the OPP, confidence in the OPP.”
“It was all very positive.
“I’ll admit there’s municipalities I’ve gone to that it hasn’t been as positive as here, but it’s clear to me the relationship here is very strong,” he added.
“Almost every detachment area I go into, it reaffirms in my mind what I’ve always believed, and that is the OPP provides great service for the dollar and that generally municipalities and communities love us.
“There are other areas where maybe revenues are down locally and the policing costs are up, and that causes a conflict, but it’s never generally about the service we provide,” Commissioner Lewis reiterated.
“The conflict is generally that the cost of policing is so high, and I get that,” he stressed. “It’s not cheap, for sure, and most municipalities, a big part of their expenditure is policing dollars and a big part of that is salary dollars.”
With the issue of rising police costs making headlines here and elsewhere in the province this past spring, Commissioner Lewis said staffing definitely has been on mind.
“Some of our detachments are very well-staffed because the municipalities are wealthy and they have a lot of officers,” he remarked.
“We have detachments, a couple in Ontario, where the municipality pays for more officers than they actually need because it’s a healthy municipality, and they said, ‘We want more people on the road, and we want a bigger crime unit.’”
On the other hand, some municipalities, such as those here in the North West Region, are affected by the decline in the forest industry and so have decreased tax revenues.
While they may be tempted to decrease policing to cut costs, Commissioner Lewis warned it can the worst time to do so as those same economic conditions can cause crime to increase.
“So when you need your maximum amount of officers, the municipality can’t afford it,” he argued. “That’s an ongoing issue for us and we’ll work at it as best we can.
“I have some ability to borrow from Peter to pay Paul, and we’ll always do that, particularly in an emergency situation,” he noted. “But there’s detachments we would like to have a lot more people in, but we don’t.
“And we’d like to have more people on the provincial side, to do highways, to do waterways, to do some of the search-and-rescue stuff that we do, but the Government of Ontario is not rolling in cash, either,” Commissioner Lewis said.
“The reality is, we’re probably as well-funded as many police departments in some ways, maybe not as well in other ways.
“But when I look at our U.S. counterparts, I think of the 50 states’ police departments, there’s very few that are even hiring; some haven’t hired for years, some are laying off or not replacing people when they retire.
“We’re not at that point,” Commissioner Lewis stressed.
