Windsor’s Downtown Mission has seen an influx of people being dropped off, some by cruisers from out of town.
City Councillor Renaldo Agostino said someone he knows recently needed help and was dropped off near the Downtown Mission.
“He was brought there from the county,” Agostino explained.
“We (the city) want to help everybody we can. We just want to make sure that we have capacity to do so and that there’s a strategic approach, rather than people just getting dropped off. It’s time to sit, have those conversations.”
According to shelter providers, drop offs are common.
“We’re there to serve our clients. It doesn’t matter where they’re coming from,” said Jason Linton, executive director of the Salvation Army.
“We have clients who walk in from the U.S. It’s happened.”
A resident on Pelissier Street said he has seen, on two separate occasions, law enforcement from outside of this jurisdiction dropping people off along the street, steps away from the Downtown Mission.
Others have claimed to know people are being dropped off in the city from elsewhere.
“We hear the stories as well,” said Rukshini Ponniah-Goulin, executive director of the Downtown Mission.
“We don’t have the proof, and again, as we tell everyone who asks us, it’s not our job to question where those individuals are coming from. It’s our job to take care of those individuals.”
Ponniah-Goulin said knowing where a person is coming from, or has been, is sometimes a mystery.
“We will do the best we can, obviously, to have those conversations with the individuals when they come through the doors. What they tell us, we track, we put into our system to provide stats to the city.”
Ponniah-Goulin believes work needs to be done on what she calls a “warm drop off.” That’s when shelter staff meet with community partners to get details about the person who needs their help.
“To ensure all of this tracking and all of this information is passed on, from one organization or one service provider to another service provider, so that that individual can be best taken care of,” said Ponniah-Goulin who plans to spark the conversation in the near future.
