The bail violation rate in the Somerset ward is nearly ten times as much as the city’s average. Local lawyer says bail violation is an offence that alarms police because it could be an “early warning signal” for future problems.
Police caught 578 bail condition breaches in Somerset ward last year, according Ottawa Police crime statistics. This translates into a least one bail violation case every day while most of the other wards had one incident a month.
A heat map shows the bail violations across the city.
Conway says one of the main reasons that explains the high rate is the cheap housing in Somerset ward. He says there are many shelters, low-income housing and single unit housing that are designed for people who are under bail conditions.
“Somerset contains a large segment of the housing and services that this population uses. That is why quite a large percentage end up hanging around Somerset,” Conway says.
“There are also more police patrolling in Somerset ward,” Conway says. “I see them all the time.” He says that he thinks the fact that police keep catching people while they are breaching their conditions contributes to the large number of bail violations.
Cst. Marc Soucy, an Ottawa Police spokesman, says the greater number of bars and restaurants in Somerset ward should be blamed for the high bail violation rate. He says they often catch people consuming alcohol when they were prohibited by the courts from doing so.
Dundonald Park, located at Lyon and Somerset Street, is a typical place that well illustrates all these reasons.
David Lelacheur, who walks his dog Pete in the park at least once a day, says the police almost come here as often as he does. He thinks it’s because of the beer store across the park.
“I have seen many times that things were left behind, beer cans especially,” Lelacheur says.
Conway says he has seen repeated examples of low-income and homeless people pulling huge garbage bags full of beers cans and beer bottles right across the park from the shelters on McLaran Street to the beer store on Somerset Street. He says the park can be a very good example where police catch some people who breach their conditions by simply drinking beer from a nearby beer store.
The number of bail violations has dropped nearly one third from three years ago. However, Somerset has historicallyhad the most violations.
Ottawa Police says decreasing the bail violations isn’t their ultimate goal, making people not commit crimes is. Soucy says “people who are under bails are those who got something criminal, so our main target is the original crime.”
He explains that it is because the breach of bail is the early-warning signal to the criminal justice system that the offender is likely to increase the criminality of their behavior. This is a trigger to grab the offender before the increase in offending becomes too serious.