Summer police detachment sought in Grand Bend to address increase in violence

More visitors from larger cities is great for local tourism, but the Grand Bend area is reportedly seeing more incidents of violence, swarming, and an overall increase in calls for police service.

Lambton OPP Detachment Commander Inspector Chris Avery gave an update on local policing during a Warwick council meeting earlier this week.

He said since the start of the pandemic, the Grand Bend area has seen a “swell” of visitors, more so from Windsor, the Golden Horseshoe, and the Toronto area.

“We’ve recorded a lot of greater violence and an upsurge in our calls for service there. We’re having an escalation of serious assaults and weapons offences,” said Avery.

“We’ve seen that some of the people who come from away — for lack of a better term — are bringing prejudices from their home area. So if we have rival street gangs that are coming, they’ll be walking down one side of the street and the other group will be on the other side, that can be a cause of some conflict and violence.”

Avery also said threats of violence have been directed toward officers. He alluded to “swarming events” where arrests were made, although it wasn’t specified when these events took place.

“Crowds come to try to take their friends back, not that that’s anything new, but it’s different when you have a bigger crowd. We arrested everyone we had equipment for and got them back to the cells,” said Avery. “The other people that needed to be arrested, [who] weren’t really all that interested in participating at a time that we didn’t have the equipment, were kind enough to come back and try to kick in our steel door so there was a short trip from the door to the cells.”

Avery said in the last five years, in the Grand Bend area, OPP has seen an increase in calls for service by around 10 per cent annually. He expects this trend to continue.

A proposal has been submitted to West Region Command, as Avery would like to see more officers in Lambton Shores while maintaining the level of service provided in other municipalities of Lambton County.

Avery said he doesn’t expect other municipalities of Lambton County to pay for “Lambton Shores’ issues” but wanted to bring it to their attention.

Although there is an OPP detachment in downtown Grand Bend that is used year-round, there is not a dedicated summer detachment there like there used to be in the past.

“I remember those days, and we were effective in those days and I tried to explain to my command staff that when we have those regular people in, they know the community, the community knows them, I find that incredibly invaluable,” Avery said.

“The last couple of years, we’ve been staffing it with overtime and with our zone officers. I have repeatedly asked for a summer detachment back and that has not been granted to me.”

Avery told Sarnia News Today that he has a meeting with West Region Command and a policing bureau from Orillia on February 22 to go over some “creative solutions” to address the issues in Grand Bend.

Lambton Shores Mayor Doug Cook said he hasn’t personally seen swarming or violent incidents but has noticed more people visiting the Grand Bend area, which puts more pressure on the police service to monitor the summer crowds.

“We actually had a very good meeting with the Solicitor General and the OPP commissioner at the ROMA convention (in January) and the police commissioner did say they’re working on more summer detachment information for the Grand Bend area, although it hasn’t been finalized,” said Cook.

Cook said Lambton Shores puts a large amount of its annual budget toward policing costs.

“I think we’re very supportive of what they’re doing and their efforts and we appreciate everything they’re doing to help us out in the summertime,” said Cook. “I think we’re just trying to find a way to reduce our cost, obviously. Most of the summer officers are on-call and overtime officers that they send from other detachments to help cover the Grand Bend area in the summertime.”

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