A new Waterloo Regional Police initiative focused on the Cambridge core aims to do exactly what its name suggests.

Project Visible, as it’s called, involves having police officers leave their cruisers to patrol the downtown Galt area on foot and via bicycle.

“It’s really geared around enhancing frontline support in the Galt core,” Chief Bryan Larkin says.

“In many ways, this is back to the basics of policing. We’re on foot. We’re on bicycle. We’re engaging. We’re interacting.”

According to Larkin, the Galt downtown was chosen for the project over Cambridge’s other two core areas because it carries the biggest demand of the three for police service.

Much of that demand, Larkin says, comes from issues related to the drug trade. He says police are dealing with that problem in two ways – by arresting people on the supply end and finding other ways to deal with people on the demand side of the equation.

Larkin says many crimes can be traced back to addiction-related issues. For example, convenience store robberies are often perpetrated by people looking for money to feed their drug habit.

“All roads lead to addiction,” he says.

A common response to issues around addiction and crime is that people should stop using drugs. Larkin says the answer isn’t nearly that simple, likening the dependencies some people have on illicit narcotics to the dependencies other people have on more accepted substances.

“How many people in our community, including myself, start every single day by having their morning coffee because that’s what fuels our day?” he says.

“We have people in our community that fuel their day based on substance use.”

Project Visible will put police officers in the Galt core between 7 a.m. and midnight, without adding new resources to the police budget.

Coun. Frank Monteiro, who was first elected after retiring from a 35-year career in policing, is a big fan of the project.

He says it will help bring the city back to how he remembers it from when he started patrolling it, with police officers walking the streets and interacting with citizens.

“In the last 15, 20 years, that went by the wayside,” he says.

As Monteiro sees it, increased police visibility and approachability can help improve the public’s view of police, while also allowing officers to gather more intelligence and learn more about the community.

Another benefit he expects is that knowledge of a police patrol presence might be enough to bring people into the core who would otherwise stay away.

“Downtown Galt is a gem. A lot of people don’t know what’s down here,” he says.

With reporting by Maleeha Sheikh