A city councillor is concerned with the rise in youth crime locally, and is hoping more can be done at a school level.
Mark McKenize, the ward 4 city councillor, is speaking out after a reported spike in youth-related crimes was revealed during an annual report from Windsor Police where between 2022 and 2023 there was nearly a 27 per cent increase.
He says he believes there needs to be more collaboration between the Greater Essex County District School Board and Windsor Police.
McKenzie says currently the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board already has a partnership with Windsor Police, but that relationship fell apart years ago with the public board.
He says engagement needs to start with youth at all ages.
"We heard it from the police chief as well at council, he said 'youth crime is up, we really need to get to those youth before they start committing those crimes', and school is the perfect opportunity to do so, start at a young age, so that way these children are familiar with police and then they start engaging with them more, and then hopefully they'll start doing more community service stuff with police, and then it kind of goes from there."
McKenzie says only some schools in the GECDSB have police - if they choose to.
"It goes by the principal right now, so it's very few and far between, where the Catholic board it's at the board level where they're saying 'yes, let's have police engaging with our schools', the Greater Essex County District School Board again is very different where it's almost one-by-one. It all depends on the school administration, so I'm saying let's rebuild this relationship."
He adds that this needs to be addressed now.
"It's 17-year-olds, it's 16-year-olds, I think it was a few weeks ago there was one 13 or 14-year-olds committing these violent crimes, and so we really need to start addressing this before it gets even worse."
During the April 22 city council meeting, McKenzie requested that a letter be sent to the GECDSB and Windsor Police encouraging them to work collaboratively with one another to focus on youth/police engagement.
He says the sooner this happens, the better, and is hoping something can be implemented before students return to school in September.