Timmins to host regional meeting of police chiefs
Zone 1A comprised of municipal, provincial and Indigenous policing agencies from across the Northeast including RCMP
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Chiefs of police and top policing administrators from across the North will be gathering in Timmins in April.
The Timmins Police Service will be hosting a zone meeting of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police in April.
“We will be inviting chiefs of police from all over the North from federal, provincial, municipal and Indigenous agencies,” Timmins Police Chief Daniel Foy explained during a TPS board meeting held Wednesday. “We are reaching out to speakers from the government to be in attendance, and the focus will be on Northern Ontario and Northern policing issues.”
Marc Depatie, corporate communications director, said they are still firming up details including the specific dates and the agenda but hope to have Ontario Attorney General Doug Downey in attendance.
Foy told the board, “It will probably be a full day consisting of one afternoon and one morning with an evening social in between.”
He said they have a couple of tentative dates they are looking at in the middle of April.
TPS is part of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police Zone 1A which is comprised of policing agencies from across the Northeast including various OPP detachments, the RCMP and municipal police services from Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and North Bay.
Depatie said zone meetings are held periodically and attended by chiefs or senior executives within police agencies. He said they will discuss crime trends and advances in investigation, and share methods or techniques being used to deal with various challenges.
“If other police agencies have encountered similar challenges, we’re eager to find out what steps they took to remedy the situation,” said Depatie. “So it’s beneficial in that regard in terms of sharing challenges and successes in the deployment of officers or specialty units.”
He cited as an example, the Mobile Crisis Rapid Response Team which pairs a Timmins Police officer with a psychiatric registered nurse or mental health specialist. It was a practice that was started up by TPS in 2019 and was inspired by the experiences shared by a police service from Southern Ontario.
“Their success was something that was very interesting to the Timmins Police Service so we launched our own (Mobile Crisis Rapid Response Team) mirroring our efforts as closely as we could to that southern agency.”
Depatie said it has “paid dividends” for the police service in terms of better assisting people who are in a crisis.
“That’s an example of how we share valuable information at these meetings that can benefit the Timmins Police Service moving forward.”
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