Peacekeepers saw fewer calls last year

The Kahnawake Peacekeepers’ annual statistics released this week show that the number of incidents has remained relatively stable, with a few categories seeing steep declines and one notably seeing a sharp increase.

That would be frauds, the number of which almost tripled when compared to 2024, from 31 to 91.

Peacekeepers’ spokesperson Kyle Zachary said that widespread Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) scams in 2025 were to blame for the increase.

That includes a false promise this fall of a $680 one-time payment promoted by a website that turned out to be a fake one. Other CRA scams include calls pretending to be the revenue agency asking about late or missing tax fillings, offering false tax credits, or fake links to file taxes.

“That’s why that number is as high as it is. We’ve had more community members come in to report this, that they’re victims of this fraud,” said Zachary.

Other incidents having seen increases are break and enter (19 in 2025, nine in 2024), sexual offences (21 in 2025, 14 in 2024), and assaults (114 in 2025, 102 in 2024).

In 2024, the number of assaults – which encompasses assault with a weapon, aggravated assault, and bodily harm – had risen 29 percent from the previous year, which Zachary had said could have been caused by the new incident registration system introduced in late 2023. The new system allows incidents to be given multiple categories and show up in multiple statistics.

Domestic violence and mental health incidents, two statistics that also saw sharp increases in the 2024 report, fell sharply in 2025, with 43 fewer incidents of domestic violence in 2025 (16 in 2025, 59 in 2024) and mental health incidents dropping by more than one third (42 in 2025, 66 in 2024).

Zachary said the sharp increase in domestic violence incidents being called in to the Peacekeepers in 2024 could potentially have been caused by an influx of people coming forward after the introduction of a domestic violence resource officer in May 2023.

Another incident category that decreased that might cause surprise is traffic calls, as the number of cars in the community and traffic mitigation were top of mind for much of 2025.

Zachary said that a higher number of cars does not necessarily correlate to more incidents, and fewer incidents does not necessarily mean less traffic to deal with. Peacekeepers being used to help traffic mitigation and enforcing the closure of the 207 in the mornings were not included here, for example.

All other incident categories – medical aid, theft, mischief, drugs, assist public, alarms, disputes, suspicious circumstances, warrants, threats, and impaired driving – also saw decreases, part of the reason for the 828 fewer calls to the Peacekeepers in 2025 than in 2024.

“The less we need to intervene, the better,” said Zachary.

While the shared statistics do not include a tally of every cause of a call to the Peacekeepers, Zachary said it is still a good way to give a good idea of what goes on during the year.

“We do the release every year to show transparency on some of the files that we are experiencing in our year, and it’s a snapshot of a select couple of files that we have investigated,” said Zachary.

“This shows what a Peacekeeper goes through in a calendar year. We’re going to continue. This is what we’re here for, we’re here for the community.”

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