Changes Coming To Public Access At Windsor Police Headquarters

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The hours that the public can access Windsor Police Headquarters are changing.

Effective Sunday, January 4th, 2015 nightly access to the public lobby area of the Police Headquarters will be restricted between 9pm and 8am. During these overnight hours, public access will be limited to emergency requests for service which will be handled by on-site uniform police officers.

Any overnight walk-in traffic making non-emergency requests for service will be able to speak with officers via intercom and will be offered a choice of alternative service delivery options which include immediate transfer to telephone report takers or referral to existing internet self-reporting tools.

Windsor Police Chief Al Frederick has emphasized the importance of clearing up misconceptions about the impact on the level of service being provided, particularly in the area of the downtown Headquarters. “We were seeing very low demand for walk-in services overnight, so by restricting non-emergency public access to the lobby we can free up officers for deployment onto the streets. But even with these changes, it’s important to remember our HQ will remain a fully operational police facility with 24/7 staffing. We’ve designed access to our lobby so that regardless of the time – day or night – any citizen seeking a safe haven in an emergency will find it at our headquarters; our building will remain fully staffed at all times to deal with any emergency requests for assistance. So in addition to our regular foot, bicycle and mobile patrol officers in the downtown core, we will still have a uniform officer presence in the station to oversee our public lobby access areas at all times.”

Police say that these changes will result in overall service delivery improvements, with staffing realignments that will allow for the redeployment of an average of five additional officers per day from station-bound desk duties to frontline mobile policing response. They say that with these changes it means that additional policing services valued at over $500,000 will be deployed to the streets.

“These recommendations were made to the Board after researching what other similar sized agencies such as Ottawa and London Police have done in this area of service delivery; we also carefully looked at the cost-benefit associated with the status quo of overnight station staffing. It became very clear there was a strong case behind changing public access hours to reflect where and when the public wants our services, which is where we want to put our resources. With these changes, we can now avoid having to take two to three officers off the road per shift to staff a lobby that no longer merits that level of personnel.”  stated Inspector Brendan Dodd of the Patrol Response Division who led the working group tasked with developing a more effective service delivery model for public lobby and main office staffing.