A busy year for the Traffic Enforcement Unit at the Windsor Police Service.
At the Windsor Police Services board meeting on Thursday, the annual crime report for 2023 was presented by police.
Traffic enforcement unit figures were up last year by 47 per cent compared to 2022, with 6,406 vehicles involved in a collision and nearly 14,000 (13,933) provincial offence notices handed out.
That was an increase of 39 per cent over 2022.
Inspector Jennifer Crosby says they're committed to road safety every year and carry out awareness campaigns to try and educate the public to bring these numbers down.
"Our R.I.D.E. programs throughout the year, our Anti-Noise campaign, and most recently we've started doing collision intersections. So you'll see that often on our social media about the top 10 collision intersections that we're at. That's all to increase road safety, and obviously enforcement actions come out of those initiatives," she said.
Crosby says there are a variety of factors leading to the increase in numbers that they've seen.
"We are doing a better job at doing our data analytics to do our enforcement at certain areas within the city. My traffic enforcement unit officers will go out to particular intersections and look for offences that are known to cause collisions at those intersections."
Looking ahead to this year, she says they'll be leaning on that improved data collection to identify problem areas and deploy their resources in a way that makes the most positive impact.
"We work very closely with the City of Windsor going over these collision intersections that are high, and what can we do better. So we take an in-depth look, a high level look at the intersections. We have really good data now that we use and we're capitalizing on that," she said.
Crosby says they're focusing on the impacted areas that tend to be the highest for collisions, but collisions occur throughout the city, so they'll have to stay vigilant to try and prevent problems.
It wasn't just the roadways drawing police attention in 2023 either, as Marine Unit enforcement's were up by 34.1 per cent over 2022 numbers with 110 vessel stops.