With demonstrations ongoing on Huron Church Road in Windsor impacting the Ambassador Bridge, many in the local community are wondering how police plan to tackle the current situation.
Windsor Police Chief Pam Mizuno joined AM800's The Morning Drive on Tuesday morning to explain how they're handling things.
Chief Mizuno says when there's large groups of people gathering, the police service's priority is the safety of everyone involved.
"The general public and the property in the surrounding areas. We definitely have a presence, of course the actions that we take and our plan is also dependent on the demonstrators themselves and the situation as it unfolds. But again public safety remains our number one priority throughout the whole situation."
A lot of locals have been calling on police to get the trucks out of there due to the impacts on the community at large, but Chief Mizuno says it's not as easy as that.
She says if it was simple enough as just getting them out of the area, they'd be gone already.
"We need to respect the rights of Canadians to exercise their freedom and balance those individual rights and freedoms with a need to maintain public peace and order. So we're going to focus on maintaining our open communication with everyone involved and use a reasoned and tempered approach, as well as the proper use of police discretion, to guide our personnel's responses."
As of now, police aren't hearing that any large amount of supporters will be coming to join in the days ahead.
But Chief Mizuno says there is always the potential for the size of the disruption to grow.
"We're going to continue to monitor, we're going to continue to have a presence. We're going to continue to investigate any situations that occur if there's any criminal acts we're going to investigate. Not always are we exercising some of our authorities during the moment, we have to make sure that we can lay charges at a later date."
Mizuno says they have issued some tickets already, and will continue to do so if people are found to be breaking the law.
Additionally, she says emergency vehicles are able to get through and get where they need to go using alternative routes because that's another big priority for police as they continue to work through the situation.