Shawn Blaj is a Superintendent with Hamilton Police Services. He spoke to the following.
• Challenges with staffing the police services – hiring does take place on a regular basis; however, we lose young recruits to other police services
• An overview of how Division 30 is divided into districts and provided a map showing the area – District 3 includes Dundas, the mountain to Brantford and Waterloo borders; D1 is the Dundas border to Sherman Avenue below the escarpment and D2 is the east end to the Niagara border
• Shawn has seen a number of changes in his 30 years in policing – a major change is that now there is much more paperwork involved in each investigation – this takes up a great deal of time of police work – the number one complaint he hears at town hall meetings is that people don’t see the police in their community and this is because the police go to a call and then have to do all the paperwork following the call
• There are minimum patrol office requirements which are currently – 18 on the mountain, 16 downtown, 17 in the east end and this has not changed in a number of years even though our city has become more populous
• There are always 2 officers in Dundas even though the Dundas substation was closed
• Calls from Dundas remain low
• Shawn spoke to Project Polar Bear – a major operation investigating the theft of high-end vehicles – organized crime, 8 arrests so far, 88% of stolen vehicles were recovered
• Provided information on how to report – emergency vs. non-emergency
• Shared some crime prevention tips