The Windsor Police Service is reporting a significant increase in impaired driving charges in the city and some of the credit is going to members of the community who call police when they see a suspected impaired driver.
Chief Jason Crowley told Thursday’s Windsor Police Services Board meeting that impaired driving by alcohol charges are up 84 per cent, while impaired driving by drugs is up 233 per cent.
Windsor Police Acting Deputy Chief Ken Cribley says the message hasn’t changed: if you’re going to drink, don’t drive.
Cribley says when he was a patrol officer, RIDE programs were usually just conducted during the Christmas season.
“That philosophy has changed over the years; we now do them scattered throughout the year at different times of the day. It used to be at bar closing times; now we’re doing them mid-afternoon on a Thursday. It’s basically, we’re doing them strategically based on data results where we’ve seen other occurrences happening,” he says.
Cribley says RIDE programs and impaired driving collisions make up a smaller number of the impaired driving charges they’re seeing.
“I think most arrests when it comes to impaired driving, I think the data would show that often times it’s somebody out there in the community calling it in, saying, ‘this person is all over the road,’ and we respond. That is a good bulk of our arrests for these offences,” he says.
Cribley says they do rely on members of the public who may see a potentially impaired driver to contact them.
“Often times when police have an opportunity to respond and catch up to that driver, it often times does result in an arrest for impaired driving,” he says.
Police also report that 35 per cent of the charges were the result of an officer with the Canada Border Services Agency stopping a suspected impaired driver entering Canada at the Windsor-Detroit border and contacting Windsor police to continue the investigation.
Cribley also credits the impaired driving by drug arrests to the service increasing their complement of officers trained to recognize impaired driving due to drugs.