MAY 6, 2021 – You can’t fight City Hall it appears. No surprises as Cornwall Police Service Chief Danny Aikman announced his retirement after only a few years as police chief. The push by the Mayor’s camp for Deputy Chief Shawna Spowart to get the top seat was much discussed in the River City. In a release he stated he was proud of lowering youth crime, but Cornwall is a city that has lost a lot of youth so it’s not apparent if young criminal simply moved to more lucrative locales. It’s essentially a city with a much higher median age than most in Ontario
Aikman’s checkered record certainly didn’t help his cause, nor his force’s handling of Covid-19 with multiple marches in the city including one led by the Mayor for BLM, and a whopping three anti mask #covidiot rallies in Cornwall.
The chief has been grist of several alleged scandals including one involving his service pistol going off at the station and nearly hitting a dispatcher before he was chief.
We may never know the full extent of his behaviors over the decades. He will be gone before 2022 and leaves a service with dramatically low numbers of female officers and visible minorities, as well as a bloated budget with policing costing Cornwall residents nearly twice that of SD&G who are policed by the OPP.