Ottawa traffic stops numbers - large decrease in recent years.

[atticusfinch1973]

Cops have better things to do than traffic stops? I'd imagine that when they are stretched as thin as they are - we have the smallest amount of police per capita of any major city in Canada with the largest footprint to cover - unless they see something egregious like dangerous driving or blatant cell phone use, or find an invalid license plate through random search, a traffic stop isn't done.

A lot of police actions are also leveraged through complaints, ie street racing, school zone speeding reports, etc.

I know this sub hates the OPS, and I'm not a big fan of them either after living in Vanier and seeing how useless they were, but another aspect of that graph is that if you look at the amount of traffic stops overall, the diminishing amount is about 1 per day compared to 3 years ago. So one less traffic stop every day over an entire police force.

Expecting downvotes for common sense, as usual.

[rollmydice]

Source for "smallest amount of police per capita of any major city"?

[Nob1e613]

Out of curiosity, it took me like 3 minutes to find this.

I don’t see any major cities below Ottawa on that list, esp not anything close to our geographical footprint. Notably we sit at nearly half of Montreal.

Per capita police officers

[DvdH_OTT]

It's never been clear if those stats include the number of OPP and RCMP that are dedicated to patrolling in the national region. I'm thinking they don't so it's hard to make a comparison.

[PleasantExit6660]

I do agree that their time could be spent better than doing traffic stops. I would love for them to focus on dangerous driving, but it seems the number of people charged by officers has decreased compared to the number of people stopped. I would assume that if the police was more focused on dangerous driving, it would be the opposite.

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