WRPS post final numbers from Project Safe Semester 2026
Posted Sep 30, 2026 11:42:20 AM.
The Waterloo Regional Police Service (WRPS) has released the full list of charges as part of its enforcement of students returning to campus and homecoming-related festivities throughout Waterloo during the month of September.
According to WRPS, the campaign known as Project Safe Semester, “aims to promote the safety and wellbeing of university and college students.” It is a local university-focused law enforcement initiative that has run annually for over a decade.
Hundreds of charges laid
Throughout Project Safe Semester’s implementation, local police said they issued 629 charges, including those related to drinking, driving and trespassing enforcement.
As part of their release, WRPS has provided a chart detailing the number of charges laid for each violation type, sorted by week.
The number of charges for Project Safe Semester 2026 sits on the middle to lower end of the scale relative to the initiative’s totals from previous years. Project Safe Semester has resulted in the following totals over the previous four years:
Police also added that 96 additional charges were laid during homecoming-related events, specifically:
- 35 Liquor Licence and Control Act offences
- 46 Highway Traffic Act offences
- 7 Criminal Code offences
WRPS say that though Project Safe Semester has now concluded, they will “continue to conduct proactive enforcement in the university district and school zones to ensure everyone’s safety.”
Chaos breaks out at University of Guelph
A year-over-year decrease in charges at the university through the month of September from 2025 is welcome for Wilfrid Laurier University and Kitchener-Waterloo as a whole, especially following the scale of charges laid and damages caused at the University of Guelph during the same period.
Guelph Police have yet to publish specific quantities of charges laid at the highly-publicized homecoming, but say in a release the event “was significantly larger than in recent years and generated several public-safety concerns.”
Guelph mayor Cam Guthrie was critical of the damaged caused as part of the University of Guelph’s homecoming in a video published to social media:
“I am beyond upset seeing videos of our emergency services getting bottles thrown at them and worse. I have heard from businesses today that I’ve been speaking with that had their windows smashed out and other property damage. And then there’s the garbage and then like, lighting of fires, and my goodness gracious.”
Crime
