Crime dropped in Waterloo Region over the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic although that did not stop police calls from rising, according to numbers provided by Statistics Canada.
The federal agency released stats it was provided by 17 police services across Canada on Monday including Waterloo Regional Police which showed crime to be down 17 per cent across the board.
“Basically what we’ve seen with Waterloo is very much like the other services,” Rebecca Kong told Global News.
Waterloo Region has seen a 12.8 per cent reduction in crime between March and August 2020 in comparison to a year earlier.
It is not across the board that crime has dropped off though.
Assaults have fallen 7.3 per cent but assaults by family members have gone up by around five per cent.
A similar picture can be seen with regard to break-ins. With everyone home, break-ins at residences were down almost 60 per cent whereas they were up nine per cent at businesses.
In addition, Kong says police have seen an increase in overall calls of 6.5 per cent.
Some of this can be attributed to an increase in domestic disturbance calls, overdose calls and in wellness checks.
Kong says Waterloo’s policing patterns followed along a similar path with other jurisdictions who participated in the study.
“If we look throughout the months of the pandemic, what happened is we saw that as businesses began to reopen, April, May, June, crime started increasing,” she explained.
Statistics Canada says that from April to May, the number increased by three per cent, from May to June (11 per cent) and again from June to July (12 per cent).