More than two years after the Ontario government announced it was buying helicopters to patrol several regions in the province, Peel Regional Police has become the first service covered under the project to get a chopper in the air.
During an announcement at a Caledon facility on Wednesday, officials showed off the Ontario-manufactured Airbus H-125 helicopter before officers start patrolling with it across Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon later in the week.
Peel Regional Police chief Nishan Duraiappah and officials said the helicopter can be up in the air for four hours at a time, and can get to Lake Ontario in Mississauga from south Caledon in six minutes.
“You can think about what it does to offset an officer in a vehicle, in a cruiser. So to provide context to the value is that it’s getting us to places we couldn’t have got to before,” he said.
“There’s some elements behind this that provide us an ability to turn the dial down on some of the pressures that people are exploiting here in the GTA.”
Peel’s air support unit now has up to 20 pilots, officers, engineers and technicians to fly and maintain the chopper and the service’s fleet of drones.
Duraiappah said the service will provide an annual report to outline how the helicopter is being used.
As originally proposed in the 2024 Ontario budget, the chopper will be one of five assigned to police services in the Greater Toronto Area and Ottawa. Officials said the network of helicopters and the associated infrastructure is set to cost $134 million. A year later, the Ford government expanded the program to Windsor and Niagara region at a cost of $57 million.
Before the launch of the helicopter in Peel region, York Regional Police and Durham Regional Police were the only municipal police services in the GTA to use helicopters.
Officials said the new helicopters are equipped with modern surveillance and aviation technology, including cameras with thermal imagery.
They said the choppers will be used for a wide variety of tasks, including urgent response to emerging incidents, tracking stolen vehicles, assisting with traffic enforcement, coordinating emergency response, suspect monitoring, and supporting active investigations.
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