The Major Crime Unit
Major Crimes includes crimes against persons such as murder, serious assaults, sex offences, abductions, missing persons, and some robberies. Other complex cases may be assigned, as well.
2020 Overview:
In 2020 the Major Crime Unit was redefined with the introduction of:
- The Special Victims Unit (SVU) which encompasses the
- Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) officer
- Human Trafficking (HT) officer
- Domestic and Elder Abuse officer
in order to better serve the most vulnerable victim populations.
The ICE Unit was involved in 93 child exploitation-related investigations including 17 pro-active undercover online investigations, 12 of which led to the arrests of the individuals. In total, 26 persons were charged, and 66 child exploitation related charges were laid, 7 of the accused were repeat offenders.
The Human Trafficking (HT) officer dealt with 83 calls for service and was able to lay about 30 charges including 7 for trafficking in persons.
There were 19 more robberies in 2020 compared to 2019 with investigators clearing 58% of the cases.
Reported Sexual Assault investigations dropped 13.8% in 2020 to 163 with 76.7% of those cleared.
Though the number is lower than reported in 2019, it is still significantly higher than the 127 reported sexual assaults in 2018.
In 2020, the Investigative Services Division piloted a project to have a Detective Constable assigned to each overdose investigation to ensure that the death was fully investigated. This will be in effect during the 2021 calendar year as well.
A successful grant application resulted in a second member being added to the Electronic Crime Unit (ECU) to assist with growing workload. In 2020 the ECU was involved in 90 cases and examined 314 devices totaling 40,026 GB of data --almost doubling the total data handled from the previous year.
Adapting to “the new normal” brought on by the pandemic in addition to legislative requirements, court preparation, tech advancements and training are expected to be a continuing challenge in 2021. Further, the opioid crisis, domestic human trafficking and internet child exploitation investigations continue to place increasing demands on police resources. As such, the Service will continue to find collaborative partnerships to address these social issues.