The Windsor Police Service is working to form a strategy and a specialized team to address and prevent the rising number of cases of intimate partner violence in the city.
Chief Jason Bellaire told Thursday's police services board meeting that they have three community partners they are working with on a pilot project and that the details of the agreement are being finalized.
Bellaire told the board that as of the end of July, intimate partner violence accounts for 35 percent of all crimes against people in the municipality.
One of the reasons an IPV pilot project is being formed is to provide immediate, real-time support or intervention when police are called to a situation in the community, rather than police finishing a call and a subject matter expert connecting with a victim the next day or even days later.
"We're also in the business of helping people. Certain aspects of our job may not be law-related, but having those partners that can help us out with that stuff is one of those things that we can certainly partner up with," he says. "It's a benefit for everybody because we're providing real-time information and real-time resources to people who actually need it."
DiCarlo says police officers have always been reactive to certain issues.
"We're responding to calls; people are calling us, but on the flip side, it's also being proactive," he says. "We're trying to get to the problem; we know there's a problem, so what are we doing about that problem? In order to solve some of these problems, we're going to have to partner with people who want to partner with us and solve some of these issues."
The IPV team that's being formed is expected to be similar to the existing Nurse Police Team and Crisis Response Team, which pairs front-line officers with subject-matter experts, such as emergency room nurses or social workers.
Those teams are focused on addressing problems such as mental health, substance abuse, or social issues at a street level in an effort to divert people towards services and away from hospital emergency rooms or the legal system.
DiCarlo says IPV is an epidemic and they want to be that helping hand to eliminate it.
"Our victim assistance does a phenomenal job in providing assistance to victims; there's no doubt about that. We're looking in real time. When we respond, we want the victims to have that access right away. I think that would help in reducing these numbers," he says.
The Windsor Police Service is applying for a grant from a provincial gender-based violence prevention program to help fund the strategy, which is expected to be officially launched in late September.
