HALDIMAND—Right before the holidays, a reader requested The Press speak with Haldimand OPP about their concerns on a perceived lack of police presence in the community.
The reader’s questions included:
- How many officers are assigned to the Haldimand detachment?
- What are the age demographics of the officers? How many are over the age of 50?
- How many are currently off for sick leave?
- How many are retirees from other jurisdictions?
- How many officers has Haldimand hired directly from Police College?
The Press forwarded the questions to Haldimand OPP, also asking for a general update on the state of policing in Haldimand.
Media relations officer Patti Cote responded. She did not provide direct answers to the reader’s questions, citing privacy concerns, but did provide some general information.
“The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), along with Municipal Police Services, hire individuals to be trained as police officers and they then attend the Ontario Police College once hired. This is different from attending traditional college for education, and then being hired for a position after completing the schooling,” explained Cote.
She continued, “I can tell you that the OPP is committed to delivering high-quality, professional frontline policing services to the citizens of Ontario. The OPP has developed an evidence-based, detachment-level, frontline, multi-year Service Delivery Model to support adequate staffing levels to ensure service delivery to protect the communities it serves.”
Cote elaborated, noting how that model is used to calculate the number of police officers required to serve each region with factors such as officer leave, response time standards, calls for service, providing support to First Nations, maintaining a proactive presence, and community engagement.
“It will also reflect the OPP’s obligation to remain fiscally responsible. The model was developed to address operational priorities as well as outline how the OPP expects to deliver policing services that will improve community safety,” said Cote. “The priorities in Haldimand County are identified in consultation with community stakeholders, the Police Services Board, and an operational analyst.”
Cote directed us toward Haldimand OPP’s most recent Action Report, published in 2021, and a Municipal Policing Bureau (MPB) presentation to Haldimand’s Police Services Board last May for more information.
She noted that an updated Action Report for 2023-25 has been submitted but is not yet publicly available.
The 2021 report, available by searching for Haldimand County on opp.ca, gives a detailed breakdown of Haldimand OPP’s actions over that period, breaking down the hours spent by officers responding to a wide variety of calls across the county.
In the presentation, Sergeant Rob Griffin of MPB provided an overview of Haldimand’s 2023 annual billing statement. Overall, the breakdown showed an estimated $8,245,576 for police services, which works out to just over $354 per billable household.
Griffin broke the numbers down further, revealing a $165.66 per household cost for base services. Additionally, Haldimand pays 1.9% of the total $178,576,909 overall provincial cost for OPP calls for service, equalling $3,417,971, or an additional $152.49 per household.
“These bills are based on averages. Sometimes a call for a simple assault may take a few hours, others may take 10 hours. When you put them all together in a group you get an average time. These times change; we constantly monitor those and adjust them accordingly as times change,” explained Griffin.
Adding additional per household costs of $13.93 for overtime, $16.28 for court security, $1.17 for prisoner transport, and $4.87 for accommodations/cleaning services, the total annual bill for the County in 2023 reaches the final $354.40 per household.
“It puts you right in where the provincial average is,” said Griffin, noting that the total payment is divided into 12 monthly payments of $687,131.
Griffin also broke down Haldimand’s four-year service call records from 2018-21, showing local yearly averages for a number of issues.
The averages reveal that on an annual basis over the period, Haldimand officers responded to 1,008 property crime violations, 280 violent criminal code calls, 698 traffic calls, 592 statutes and acts calls, with the majority of their calls classified as ‘Operational’ (3,444), and ‘Operational 2’ (1,380).
“It’s actually very normal to have a very high number there, because Operational are calls we do every day that are non-criminal. We attend a lot of things that may not require a lot of police resource. We’ll go to a neighbour dispute where there’s no criminality,” explained Griffin.
Operational 2 “was created to create an efficiency,” he said, noting it refers to calls that require significantly shorter amounts of time to complete: “These things are done … to make policing more affordable.”
Griffin said the statistics are vital tools when it comes to resource allocation.
So, while we were unable to get a direct answer to some of those questions, we hope this information provides some clarification on how Haldimand’s OPP detachment operates. Keep an eye on a future issue of The Haldimand Press for a breakdown of the updated 2023-25 OPP report when it becomes available.
