The pandemic is impacting everything, including crime rates in Saint John for the past month.
Jim Hennessy, spokesperson for the Saint John Police Force, said the pandemic is a new situation for everyone.
“There’s a difference, there’s no question about it. We’ve seen a 19 per cent drop in calls for service from March of this year,” he said.
“Now that decrease is partially to do with the state of emergency which of course was issued by the government of New Brunswick on March 16. There’s a few other factors as well.”
In 2019 there were 241 motor vehicle accidents in March and this year that number is 135. There were 34 break and enters last March and this year, 26.
The provincial government raised a state of emergency which asked all food and beverage businesses to be reduced to take out and delivery service and limited places where large groups of people could gather, including schools, entertainment areas such as gyms, cinemas and so forth to stop admitting the public.
“There has been an increase in disturbance calls. When we say disturbance calls, a lot of times you can attribute that to maybe some neighbours having a dispute over something,” he said.
Hennessy said police have had to deal with some calls they normally wouldn’t have to deal with.
“There’s four screening questions that we have to ask due to the state of emergency and what we’re dealing with, with COVID-19,” he said.
Hennessy said the police also answer as many calls as possible via phone to avoid close contact to make it safer for police and their families as well as the public.