The recent Crime Severity Index (CSI) released by Statistics Canada says crime is on an upward trend in Sarnia.
The latest statistics indicated violent crime in the city was up by 24.48 per cent in 2023 compared with 2022, but still below 2021 figures. Non-violent crime was up 4.42 per cent.
Overall, last year's crime rate was up 19.61 per cent over the year before. Provincially, the police reported crime rate per 100,000 population saw an increase of 7 per cent.
He said in 2022, public feedback showed a high number of residents had been a victim of crime, but never reported it.
"So since then, we've worked to increase the ability and the confidence of our public to report crimes," said Davis. "We've introduced the Community Crime Unit, we've introduced online reporting and we've certainly been much more public in our activities as far as police go in our arrests and our charges."
The CSI also indicated a 17 per cent drop in break and enters and a whopping 106 per cent spike in breach of probation incidents.
Davis said breach of probation is the service's number one charged offence right now.
"Because we are, as a police service, we are focusing on those recidivist issues because those are disproportionately causing us problems," he said. "So we're enforcing the orders, the bails, the probations and we're putting them before the courts, and that's our part of the process and we'll continue to do our part."
Davis said the CSI measures changes in the level of severity of crime in the community year over year, and these statistics allow the service to track in which direction we're trending, and anticipate what they're going to be dealing with in the future.
"What we're looking at here is a couple of things," he said. "Number one is we're looking at workload and how our officers are going to be able to manage this increase in crime reporting within our resource structure. Number two is, in terms of the violent crime, critically important to people, in particular people that are victims of this crime, we need to be able to be effective in how we investigate, process and bring the perpetrators to justice."