Windsor police fleet report shows more incidents but less costly vehicle damage in 2025

Windsor police cruisers seen at Windsor's City Hall in Windsor, Ont. on Aug. 12, 2025. (Chris Campbell/CTV News Windsor)

The Windsor Police Service is reporting an increase in the number of damage or collision incidents involving its vehicles but a decrease in the cost of the damage.

The fleet collisions and damage summary report for 2025 shows there were 63 collisions or damage-incurring incidents, a 12.5 per cent increase compared to 2024.

However, there was a decrease in both total costs incurred and costs per incident, down to $190,090 and $3,144, respectively.

In 2024, there were 56 incidents that resulted in $217,210 in damage or $3,879 per incident.

A collision or damage can be categorized as anything from a minor incident like a vehicle brushing up against something like a pole to an actual collision.

Director of Planning and Physical Resources for the Windsor Police Service Barry Horrobin says there were four incidents in 2025 involving the total loss of the vehicle, which made up $73,890 of the total loss.

“We look at it and we make a business decision. If the amount of cost and the time to take the vehicle off the road is greater than the value of what we’d get back from the restored vehicle and the life expectancy it has left, then we classify it as a write-off and replace it through a capital replacement process,” he says.

Horrobin says a police vehicle is expensive because it is a mobile workplace that has advanced specifications and is outfitted with all kinds of police-specific tools.

“When you have all of that, there’s just more stuff that could break if I could use that term,” he says. “Even things like a very, very minor collision might do minimal, if any, actual damage to the car, but it might be where the impact happened; it might have been one of these pieces of upfitted equipment, so we have to consider that.”

Horrobin says this is not your average member of the public’s vehicle; they operate at all hours.

“Higher stress on the vehicle type of condition is much higher in a police vehicle because of the nature of the work that it’s required to perform compared to an average commercial vehicle for that matter. So, these are all things that contribute to an increase of probability of stuff that could go wrong,” he says.

According to the report, 37 of the 63 incidents involved the vehicle’s driver actions as having some tangible impact or cause affecting the outcome, with the other 41% representing situations completely out of the driver’s control.

When there is damage, the Windsor police senior leadership team does examine Safe Arrival data collected from the vehicles to ensure officers are responding to calls in a safe and timely manner while also reviewing situations to see if additional training or corrective actions are needed.