THUNDER BAY – City police presented its 2025 annual report to city council, sparking questions from two councillors about how the service provides feedback to the public.
In a presentation to city council on Tuesday, Thunder Bay Police Service’s director of corporate communications Tracie Smith and Chief Darcy Fleury highlighted the findings in the service’s 2025 annual report.
Police board chair Karen Machado was also in attendance to answer questions from council.
After presenting the report, Coun. Brian Hamilton asked if the police are seeing a trend in online reporting and how the service is following up with the people making a submission.
“We are working very aggressively to make sure that our people are getting calls back, and sometimes it doesn’t happen overnight, or sometimes it takes a few days, but we always want a response of some form to the people that are making the complaints to the service. So that’s something that we’re still continuing to improve on and an area that we have to pay attention to,” Fleury said.
Fleury said they have seen an uptick in online reporting in 2025 and expect to see those numbers grow in 2026.
Hamilton then asked if the service had a certain standard or a gauge in response times for online reporting.
“I don’t think we put an exact number of percentages to what we want to see. I mean, I’d like to see 100 per cent call back to everybody who’s made a complaint. I think realistically we have to look at where we are resource-wise and the number of complaints that we have,” Fleury said.
“I just remind the council that we are a very active police service. The majority of our attention is paid to those priority one calls. I think you saw the demonstration of the amount that we have, which is very time-consuming. I think we do want to get to a point where we see a lot higher results in those callbacks. So that’s something we can strive to.”
Coun. Greg Johnson asked how input from the community is assessed by the service, particularly when members of the public weigh in on the service’s policies and procedures of informing the public.
Smith says a lot of communications are limited by privacy regulations.
“So we provide as much information to the community as we’re able to, outside of those limitations and as resources allow,” she said.
Smith said police had responded to over 50,000 calls in 2025.
Roughly 620 fraud or identity theft charges were laid, about 550 mischief charges, 480 thefts from motor vehicle charges, 320 break and enters, 244 robbery offences and 216 sexual assaults or other sexual offences.
There were also 65 charges of assault against a peace officer and 15 arson charges laid.
And of the 3,074 people charged in 2025, 203 were youths.
Police also conducted seven homicide investigations with six homicide charges laid.
Hamilton noted that Fleury has been outspoken about getting upstream investment into social services to take the pressure off the police service.
“We take the position all the time that whatever we can do to help the agencies. We work together with different social agencies or mental health or whatever the situation may be. We really want to see those groups out and active in helping their clients because that takes a lot of pressure off of the police service. We do not want to see people going through the justice system when they may need other services outside of policing,” Fleury said.
