Ottawa police assign youth officers to city's school districts
Police say the initiative is in response to rising levels of violence in schools
The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) is returning to city schools with a revised approach, assigning officers to support educators without being stationed inside buildings.
Four officers from the Community Youth Unit are now assigned to the city's four school districts — east, south, central, and west — ensuring each district has a dedicated officer for school engagement.
"What that means, really, is improving the efficiency of how we provide a service to our schools, whether it be proactive work, which means presentations, lockdown practices," OPS Staff Sergeant Fernando Vieira said.
Teachers will be able to call their assigned youth officer directly, allowing for faster consultation.
"If we feel like it's warranted, we will go to the schools," Vieira said.
The move marks a shift from four years ago, when the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board voted to stop participating in a programme that placed officers inside schools.
Concerns over strained relationships between police, students, and families led OPS to close the programme citywide.
'Violence increasing in our schools'
Chief Eric Stubbs told the Ottawa Police Services Board on Monday that the new approach is in response to "a larger trend" of violence in schools and aims to build trust between officers and students.
"We want the school boards, parents, and students to know that we are here to help, and we have begun to increase our presence in schools," Stubbs said.
Vieira said the initiative resulted from consultation with school boards about "levels of violence increasing in our schools."
"It was a collaboration between and conversations that we were having with the school boards, recognizing that these are some of the issues that we're seeing," he said.
OPS has long advocated for a return to schools, arguing that engagement helps build trust and provides additional support for students in need.
Vieira said the initiative will do more than address youth offending.
"It's not just making youth accountable for the criminality that we're seeing in our schools and mitigating some of the victimizations that we are also seeing, but it's also inspiring youth to become police officers, which we need."
Some youth advocates say increased police presence can foster better relationships with students who may need additional resources.
"It just makes sense that if they have some sort of a relationship that's going to make it easier for the child... to feel the benefit of being referred," said Michael Hone, the executive director of Crossroads Children's Mental Health Centre.
Not all stakeholders support the move.
School board trustee Lyra Evans, who voted to remove officers from schools in 2020, opposes police returning to schools.
"The police have created a point person based on geography for schools to call. We have not changed our policies or practices around our interactions with police. So we have not switched to a proactive policing model from the reactive policing model," Evans said.
"A designated point person means that there will be a little bit of consistency between who shows up when the police are called, but won't change it to a police wandering the halls, police being in schools proactively, which was the primary concern," she added, citing a 2021 OCDSB study highlighting concerns.
Evans said there were particularly grave concerns from marginalized students when the board reviewed having police stationed in schools.
"We found, particularly from racialized students, LGBTQ students, and students with disabilities or their families, that having a police presence in the school was causing them to feel heightened rates of anxiety, heightened rates of scrutiny, and was contributing to or having a negative impact on their results in school, their ability to function, their ability to learn," she said.
School boards say they will continue calling 911 to report major crimes, rather than relying solely on the Community Youth Unit.
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With files from Emma Weller