Sault Ste. Marie Police Service wants to establish a bail compliance unit in order to keep tabs on people who have been released on bail.
A $400,000 proposal by the police service to create the unit is currently pending approval, members of the Sault Ste. Marie Police Services Board heard during a meeting held Thursday.
The police service has received assurances from the Ministry of the Solicitor General that the Crown Attorney’s office will work with it “to make sure that those bail charges are actually prosecuted,” according to Sault Ste. Marie Police Service Deputy Chief Robert MacLachlan.
“That will give us a better handle on what people are doing and how much they’re complying,” MacLachlan said.
A pair of full-time officers would be hired in order to operate the bail unit under the proposal.
“We made it clear that due to our staffing challenges, we would need to have sufficient funds to hire FTEs (full-time employees) to do this,” MacLachlan said.
The most up-to-date statistics from Sault Police show that there were 415 bail violations between January and July of this year, a nearly 19 per cent increase over the same time period in 2022 when there were 349 bail violations recorded by the police service.
People released on bail are released on recognizance with conditions, which could include a stay-at-home order, an order to stay with a surety or a curfew.
“Many of which, of course, don’t take that necessarily very seriously,” said MacLachlan. “The officers are empowered by the courts to go and knock on their doors, make sure they are compliant, talk to the sureties, see if the sureties have any concerns — and let those people that are out on bail know that they are being monitored, and they should take the conditions of their recognizance seriously, which includes not repeating crimes while they’re on bail.”
Officers do all of that now, said the deputy chief, but workload challenges are leading to inconsistencies in monitoring people for bail compliance.
“It’s always good to let those people on those conditions know that there are consequences to violating,” MacLachlan said.
The deputy chief said that while there’s a lot of focus on violent crime locally, there’s also a need to remember that the community is “highly affected” by repetitive property crime.
“This bail compliance enforcement, with a higher presence of officers checking on these individuals, will hopefully have a deterrent effect on that as well,” MacLachlan said.
Sault Ste. Marie Police Service Chief Hugh Stevenson added that the establishment of a bail compliance unit would also put more compliance offences before the court because there would be more officers looking into bail violations, as opposed to “stumbling across” them.
“The deterrent effect of these conditions need to be enforced so that people realize when they’re given the opportunity to be released with conditions, that they need to abide by it from a public safety perspective,” he said.
Stevenson added that offenders “running around” with multiple property offences under their belt while on bail is “ridiculous.”
“Everybody knows it, and it’s time that we all get together with both the Ontario and federal governments to solve this problem, because the community is not protected when people are running with 28 charges,” he said.