Thank you very much.
Windsor, Ontario is home to 200,000 citizens and welcomes thousands of visitors daily through the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel, the Ambassador Bridge, and by way of boat across the Detroit River. The river is one kilometre wide, separating the great countries of Canada and the United States of America. It stretches about 22 kilometres along the Windsor border.
The mission of the Windsor police service is "to prevent and investigate crime, to provide support and to enforce the law in partnership with the community". We take our mission duties very seriously. Probably the most important component of our mission is partnerships, the relationships we have developed over many years within our regional community and with law enforcement partners.
These law enforcement partnerships encompass municipal agencies, along with provincial, state, and federal law enforcement groups on both sides of the border. We all require the support of each other to keep our cities and regions safe and secure.
The Detroit River plays host to almost a half million recreational boats from both Canada and the Untied States during the warmer months. Close to 5,000 commercial or ocean-going ships will dock in Windsor or Detroit or pass between Canada and the United States along this section of the Detroit River yearly. It is an extremely busy waterway.
The Windsor police service's main responsibility is to the citizens of Windsor. That being said, we accept our role as first responders to any police-related matter that occurs in our city or region; this includes the Detroit River. Sometimes these issues may have a more direct impact on provincial or national interests. Certainly, the link to Canada along the NAFTA highway, from Mexico through the United States and across the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, would be one such example.
As first responders, the Windsor police service is familiar with many issues surrounding the policing of the Ambassador Bridge. It also holds true for policing the waterways between Detroit and Windsor. Police partnerships in my region have grown exponentially into incredible, trusting, focused relationships, all with the same goal: protecting and serving our citizens. We have found ways to fight cross-border crime from previously informal ways of working things out to a more standardized, official and, most importantly, an authorized-by-law manner of policing.
Windsor police has been a member of BEST, the Border Enforcement Security Task Force, since 2009. A Windsor police officer works with numerous multijurisdictional law enforcement agencies from Ontario and the United States in an office in Detroit, Michigan. The creation of this BEST unit has allowed my police agency to acquire real-time intelligence information from the United States. We can then act on that information, or disseminate it accordingly.
Thanks to title 19 training, my officers have all the authorities of a United States customs officer and are authorized by United States law to carry firearms into the Untied States of America.
We've had numerous cross-border investigations end successfully in both Ontario and the Untied States. For many years, criminals have taken advantage of the failure of law enforcement to cooperate in cross-border investigations. Illegal commodities, such as firearms, drugs, and human smuggling, have flourished through cross-border transport. We need to continue to cooperate in this sensitive style of police work to make it that much more difficult for organized criminals to exploit our cross-border law-enforcement weaknesses.
Shiprider is certainly a valued, enhanced threat to organized cross-border crime. The Windsor police service believes in and embraces Shiprider's value and we welcome the partnership it creates between Canada and the United States of America.
Thank you.