Sault Ste. Marie Police Service has fielded 104 COVID-19 complaints between March 30 and April 25, but has yet to lay charges under the provincial Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act.
In a report to the Police Services Board Thursday, Police Chief Hugh Stevenson informed board members that while the majority of the complaints have dealt with social gatherings, four of the ‘COVID calls’ dealt with public questions about essential businesses.
According to the police service, three of those businesses were deemed essential in the end, while in the fourth instance, a business was "educated on which businesses have been deemed essential."
“There has been a number of concerns in the community, specifically later on in the time period about who’s essential and who’s not, who’s operating and who’s not,” Stevenson said in his report. “And after we looked into it, they all have been following the rules. So that’s good news for the community.”
Police report another 10 ‘miscellaneous’ COVID-19 calls, running the gamut from self-isolation measures following international travel to coughing in the direction of a cashier at a store.
“In that case, the store issued a trespass notice, so the person is no longer welcome in that store,” said Sault police spokesperson Lincoln Louttit in an email to SooToday. “If they were to attend that store again, and we were called, we could issue a trespassing ticket.”
Six warnings issued for social gathering calls
The police service has also responded to 90 calls regarding social gatherings since the end of March, 18 of which were unfounded.
In 20 of those gathering calls responded to, no one was home upon arrival.
Another three of those gathering calls remain unsolved.
Officers have issued a total of six warnings about social gatherings to groups so far, with 18 groups receiving ‘education’ from officers - the first step of its three-step, graduated approach to enforcing laws surrounding social gatherings.
Stevenson says the force hasn’t been put in a position to charge anyone with a violation of the EMCPA yet.
“We’ve been very clear in the media that we have a graduated response to the COVID,” he told board members. “I’ve said before and I continue to say this community has listened and behaved accordingly, given the fact that we’ve been very clear that after a warning, if there’s a subsequent offense, we will charge - and we have not been put into that scenario.”
No spike in domestic violence calls during COVID-19 crisis
Sault Ste. Marie Police Service data isn’t indicating a spike in domestic violence incidents during the pandemic, either.
The police chief reports that domestic violence calls during the COVID-19 pandemic are “relatively consistent in numbers” when comparing the period of March 17 to April 25 of this year to the same period last year, with 153 domestic violence calls in 2020 and 146 calls in 2019.
“They are always concerning and we will always work to decrease them, but in terms of some of the social media about domestics increasing, we haven’t seen that during that time period based on our data,” he said.
More information on the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act can be found on the Sault Ste. Marie Police Service website.