From auto theft and bail reform to extortion and police staffing, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown has increasingly pushed beyond city hall to press Ottawa and Queen’s Park for action on public safety.
A survey conducted earlier this year by Queen’s Park Briefing ranked Brown as the Ontario mayor seen as having the greatest impact on public safety in his community.
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One of the most visible changes has been within Peel Regional Police, which is in the midst of what Brown has described as the largest expansion of frontline policing in the country, with plans to add 750 officers over four years.
Adrian Woolley, the president of the Peel Regional Police Association, said the additional staffing has already eased some of the pressure on officers in a region that had fallen behind some major Canadian police services in officers per capita.
“Having someone like Patrick at the microphone advocating for more staff, boots on the ground, and officers out there… he was at the forefront, fighting every day,” Woolley said in an interview with iPolitics.
For officers already on the job, Woolley said one of the most noticeable differences has been the impact on workload and burnout.
“The burnout isn’t as prevalent as it was before,” he said, adding while officers remain busy, having additional staffing helped spread the workload.
Brown’s public safety push didn’t stop at adding officers.
Woolley said the mayor has been able to build support around the broader idea that residents, regardless of their views on policing, want to feel safe in their communities.
“I think that he found a common ground with everyone that everyone should feel safe in their community, and I think that’s an easy win for anyone to understand,” Woolley said.
Some of the more prominent advocacy has involved policies that mayors usually had little direct control.
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Earlier this summer, Ottawa’s bail reform bill became law, making it harder for people accused of certain serious crimes to get bail, including violent auto theft, break and enter, human trafficking, assault, sexual assault and violent extortion.
Brown had pushed Ottawa for bail reform for years, including through a federal petition launched following the death of Darian Henderson-Bellman in 2020.
Woolley said those concerns reflected what officers were encountering in Peel.
“We certainly have recidivism in people that are let out that should not be let out,” he said, pointing to Brampton’s A. Grenville and William Davis Courthouse as one of the country’s busiest.
Tom Stamatakis, president of the Canadian Police Association, cautioned against portraying Brown as the only mayor pressing senior governments on public safety, but said his previous experience in federal politics gives him an understanding of how to push for change in Ottawa.
Stamatakis said Brown’s approach, like funding the local police service while lobbying for legislative changes at other levels of government, is something that he would like to see more mayors do.
More recently, Brown has turned his attention to extortion, pushing Ottawa to treat a surge in cases as a national problem rather than one confined to Brampton and Peel.
“Extortion is an issue right across the country,” Stamatakis said. “We’ve got an epidemic of that kind of criminal activity occurring not just in his community, but on the West Coast, on the East Coast.”
The police association head said Brown’s willingness to identify when a local problem has broader implications is one of the mayor’s strengths.
While Stamatakis noted changes on the federal level, he said improving public safety requires more than adding police officers or passing tougher criminal laws.
Gaps in mental health care, addiction treatment and social services become public safety problems themselves, he argued, leaving police to respond to crises and disorder that may have originated elsewhere in the system.
“When we have gaps in other services, whether it’s health care or social services, it does have a public safety impact,” he said.
