The North Bay Police say in October the service received more than 400 calls regarding unwanted or suspicious persons and a total of 905 related to social disorder.
Mike Daze, North Bay's deputy police chief says their officers spend a significant amount of time dealing with these incidents.
"Yes, when talking about suspicious persons, it isn't necessarily just about people being around residents," he said. "We get calls every day about somebody who's walking down the street and may appear suspicious and the public wants us to respond. It doesn't mean that a crime has occurred."
Daze noted that they are responding to many of these calls for service. But has a crime been committed?
"So we do get a lot of suspicious persons calls, we get a lot of unwanted person calls," he said, noting some could be just simply an individual with a backpack cycling through a neighbourhood.
"Oftentimes we see that those may fall into the realm of social disorder and not a crime taking place, but their calls for service and come in. And every time we respond to those there is a percentage of time that police officers have to spend doing that investigation."
Daze says these calls are tough to investigate.
"So was the person really suspicious? What was there we often don't have enough information to really say what this suspicious activity was and was it even crime related," he questions.
"So those are investments of time that the police officer wrote responding to doing those investigations that aren't that proactive from involvement."
