1. CRIME PREVENTION OTTAWA –ACTION REPORT 2009-2010

PRÉVENTION DU CRIME OTTAWA – RAPPORT D’ACTION 2009-2010

Committee Recommendation

That Council receive this report for information.

Recommandation DU Comité

Que le Conseil reçoive ce rapport à titre informatif.

Documentation

1. Crime Prevention Ottawa, Chair’s report dated 18 November 2010 (ACS2010-CCS-CPS-0033).

Report to/Rapport au :

Community and Protective Services Committee

Comité des services communautaires et de protection

and Council / et au Conseil

November 18, 2010 / le 18 novembre 2010

Submitted by/Soumis par :

Jacques Legendre, Chair / Président

Crime Prevention Ottawa / Prevention du Crime Ottawa

Contact Person/Personne ressource :

Nancy Worsfold, Executive Director / Directrice générale

Crime Prevention Ottawa / Prévention du crime Ottawa

(613) 580-2424 x28518, Nancy.Worsfold@ottawa.ca

City-Wide/ À L'échelle De La Ville

Ref N°: ACS2010-CCS-CPS-0033

SUBJECT:	CRIME PREVENTION OTTAWA –ACTION REPORT 2009-2010

OBJET :	PRÉVENTION DU CRIME OTTAWA – RAPPORT D’ACTION 2009-2010

REPORT RECOMMENDATION

That Community and Protective Services Committee and Council receive this report for information.

RECOMMANDATION DU RAPPORT

Que le Comité des services communautaires et de protection et le Conseil reçoivent ce rapport à titre informatif.

BACKGROUND

In the five years since Crime Prevention Ottawa came into existence, significant progress has been made towards a long-term vision for reducing crime and victimization in our community. CPO offers a wide range of initiatives covering our three strategic priorities: violence against women, crime affected neighbourhoods and youth in high risk situations.

DISCUSSION

Crime Prevention Ottawa is working towards the goals of our new strategic plan, as approved in November 2009. The Strategic Plan emphasized the importance of maintaining our successful initiatives while building new projects. The following are some highlights:

New Initiatives:

Crime Prevention Ottawa’s Neighbourhood Toolkit is an online resource (a printable version is also available on the website) that provides ideas, information and resources to help Ottawa residents make their neighbourhoods better places to live. The Toolkit encourages residents to get involved in their neighbourhoods and to be accountable and proactive about community safety. Individuals, community associations, Neighbourhood Watch volunteers and many others will find helpful ideas and practical information about building safer neighbourhoods from the ground up. The Toolkit also contains information about specific problems and crimes and how to get help from municipal and community resources in Ottawa. You can learn more about the Toolkit by visiting: www.crimepreventionottawa.ca/toolkit. The Toolkit was launched at a successful media conference in May 2010 and staff have followed up with 45 presentations to promote the Toolkit

Paint It Up! This youth engagement mural project is a partnership between CPO and the public works department. CPO successfully managed a grants process and contracted with 9 community agencies to fund murals with the objectives of engaging youth positively, beautifying the community and discouraging graffiti.

Community Safety Awards: CPO has now hosted two awards nights to honour the efforts of citizens, volunteers, leaders, businesses and agencies. The Awards are intended to reward hard work and to inspire others with their stories. The stories of the winners have been widely disseminated both through the event, the CPO website and through pro-active media relations.

CODA: Connecting on Disability and Abuse. After a successful town hall meeting CPO partnered with community members, agencies, the City and police to create CODA. The committee is very active with multiple projects, it has also recently received a federal contribution of $27,000 to build its awareness work.

Ongoing Strategic Priorities

Ottawa Youth Gang Prevention Initiative: CPO in partnership with the Youth Services Bureau and Police, is working towards a comprehensive prevention strategy based on a four component approach: Healthy Neighbourhood Cohesion, Early Prevention, Intervention and Suppression. Milestones to date include two public forums, two educational conferences, two research reports and twelve parent awareness workshops in targeted neighbourhoods.

The highlight this year was a project to engage the faith communities in gang prevention work. Based on a best practices report we organized a series of three town halls and engaged over 50 faith leaders.

Making neighbourhoods safer: CPO funds and works closely with three neighbourhood based projects. “Together for Vanier – Ensemble pour Vanier” and “Lowertown Our Home – Basse-ville, notre chez nous” both of which have received an award from the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, the first time that a municipality has won twice in a row! We also support the United Neighbours project in the Pinecrest- Queensway area which just secured $150,000 from the Trillium Foundation. CPO is also an active participant in the Community Development Framework.
Ending Violence Against Women before it starts: CPO has worked successfully with Ottawa's two largest school boards to implement “The Fourth R,” a comprehensive and proactive curriculum for Grade 8 and 9 students that provides coping skills on dating violence, sexuality, substance abuse and violence. We have now trained 110 teachers to provide this curriculum. We continue to work actively towards implementation in the other two Boards.

CPO Offers learning opportunities: CPO continued our successful speaker series with 4 events at City Hall. We also organized, in partnership with local agencies and CPTED Ontario, a successful conference on CPTED in the Community. The conference drew participants from as far away as Saskatchewan!
CPO goes to the root causes of crime before it happens. We want to stop reacting – and we all know how expensive that is – and start preventing.

CONSULTATION

Crime Prevention Ottawa engages the community through multiple channels. The CPO Community Forum is the formal mechanism for seeking feedback on our work. This is a group which was established through our terms of reference as a consultation group. CPO also issues a regular email update entitled CPO Communiqué which has a distribution list of over 1,800 concerned citizens and key stakeholders. Finally, CPO organizes regular public events, all of which are evaluated, in order to engage the community in preventing crime.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

N/A

SUPPORTING DOCUMENTATION

Document 1: Action Report 2009-2010 (English - French)

DISPOSITION

Council and Committee Services to forward the report to Council for information.