JOSHUA ALLAN
The 1510 West

Since Monday, police officers have been patrolling the commercial areas of Dorval and Pointe Claire on foot, part of a pilot project by the Montreal force to increase its presence in commercial districts.

“The foot patrols are there to reassure our merchants (and) to have a police presence,” Dorval Mayor Marc Doret said in an interview last week.

Doret had announced the launch of the initiative at the April 14 city council meeting.

“We’re very excited,” he said at the meeting. “We’ve been discussing that (project) with the police for well over a year, if not, closer to two years.”

Under this program, a team of two Montreal police officers will spend a few hours several times a week patrolling the commercial districts of Dorval and Pointe Claire, occasionally branching out into other areas of the cities. The program will also see officers patrolling local parks on bikes. The patrols will alternate their beats between daytime and nighttime shifts.

For Doret, a police presence is key to preventing crime in the city’s commercial district, which consists of dozens of businesses, including grocery stores, banks, restaurants and smaller retailers.

“A police car that drives down Dorval Ave., it’s a few seconds and it’s gone,” he explained. “A police patrol that spends 3-4 hours walking up and down the street, talking to the merchants, talking to the public, that’s a whole different ball game. It’s the presence of the police inside the community that’s really the thing we were looking for. It reassures people.”

The Montreal police service has had other foot patrols operating in several boroughs and neighbourhoods for the past few months, including in Pierrefonds, Île Bizard, Ste. Geneviève, Lachine and St. Laurent, police spokesperson Mélanie Bergeron told The 1510 West.

The Montreal force will assign foot patrol teams to areas of downtown Montreal starting in May, Chief Fady Dagher announced last month. He told reporters that the officers will be there to prevent crime, but also to assist unhoused and other vulnerable people, an issue that Doret said is becoming more present in Dorval as well as in Montreal.

“We’ve seen generally on the West Island that homelessness is becoming more apparent,” Doret said, adding that the police presence will serve to work with this vulnerable community before any crime takes place and be able to respond quickly if it does.

“Yes, they will deal with crime,” Doret added. “But the important thing is that a police presence makes it harder for crime to take place.”

The foot patrol program is scheduled to last throughout the summer until September.