Community fairly safe: police

[attach]6034[/attach]Crime statistics for 33 Division show the area is pretty safe, according to police.

“Incidents of violence we don’t have a lot of,” Inspector Richard Hegedus, the division’s number 2 officer, told a community meeting on May 30.

In all, the division saw 22 break and enters, four street robberies, two sexual assaults, 16 assaults, two [url=https://streeter.ca/auto-thefts-not-what-they-seem.html]auto thefts[/url], 21 thefts from vehicles, and 35 thefts (including both under $5,000 and over $5,000) from May 15 to 28.

Of the 16 assaults, police have identified suspects in all but one incident, Det. Sgt. Jim Gotell told the meeting.

“That’s common,” he said. “Assaults aren’t generally something that we don’t know who did.… People generally don’t just get assaulted by a stranger.”

In some of the assaults, charges won’t be laid, he said. One involved two residents at a nursing home who both suffer from dementia, so police have ruled there was no criminal intent in that case.

The one case that lacks identified suspects to this point involves suspects who were unknown to the victims.

“A man and his wife are at their home, he’s got some teenagers loitering on his property, he goes out and asks them to leave,” Gotell said. “They don’t want to go. One kid ends up punching him in the face and pushes his wife to the ground. That’s the one we haven’t gotten.”

Younger people were also involved in an armed robbery in the Sheppard and Bayview area. Gotell said a 10-year-old boy was robbed at knifepoint for four dollars.

“The kids were older. He described them to be about 13, 14 years old,” Gotell said. “Four kids approached him from behind, told him they wanted his money, one of them had a knife. He had four loonies in his pocket, so he threw them on the ground and ran away.

“We’re fairly confident that we know who did it and we’re fairly confident we’ll be arresting them,” he added.