'More to be done': Thunder Bay police work to address rising impaired driving numbers

Thunder Bay police are training more officers to spot impaired drivers as the number of people charged for the offence continues to rise in the city.

As of Tuesday morning, 30 people had been charged with an impaired driving-related offence since the beginning of 2021.

Twenty-three of those charges came in January, up from 14 in January 2020, and 17 in January 2019.

"The question is, is that because of some bigger factor?" Thunder Bay police traffic Const. Mark Cattani said. "Is [COVID-19] causing substance abuse issues? Is there a drug epidemic that's contributing to it?"

"Or is it just a matter of better training and better recognition by the officers to spot specifically the drug-impaired driving that's causing the issue?" he said. "I think it might be safe to say that there's probably a combination of all those factors, given that even the alcohol-impaired driving is up over last year as well."

"It's really tough to draw trends and conclusions when you talk about the impaired driving," Cattani said. "I think what is important to point out, though, is that it's on the rise and that there's still much more to be done in order to combat it."

The charges laid in January 2021 involved 11 people who were impaired by drug, and 12 by alcohol, Cattani said, adding that while impaired drivers are broken up into those two categories, in many cases, an individual is found to be impaired by both.

The number of impaired drivers in the city has been rising for years. Police charged a record 299 people with an impaired driving-related offence in 2020, which was up from 204 in 2019.

Cattani said police are training more officers to conduct standardized roadside sobriety tests.

"Previously, unless there was gross impairment, the only real tools that the officers had when they suspected an impaired driver at the roadside was to use [an] alcohol screening device, which is fine if there is alcohol playing a role in the impairment," he said. "However, oftentimes the impairment is by something that's not alcohol at all. It could be a drug, whether it be prescribed and legal, or illicit."

Standardized field sobriety tests, Cattani said, "allows the officer to detect impairment by any substance."

Cattani said new officers are pushed to get the training as soon as they join the service, and Thunder Bay police are also working to get all members of its uniform patrol branch trained.

"We've really ramped up our ability to detect those people who, in the past, may have been released at the scene, because we couldn't attribute why they were driving in the manner that they were," he said. "We were calling it a medical emergency or something to that effect."

"I think that's probably the largest contributing factor."

Police have also increased the number of drug recognition experts, who further evaluate people arrested for impaired driving at police headquarters, Cattani said.