Time to stop shrugging off Edmonton’s murder rate

The good news? Edmonton isn’t actually the murder capital of Canada.

In its new report on crime severity in Canada, Statistics Canada awards that dubious distinction to Thunder Bay, Ont.

In 2016, says StatsCan, Thunder Bay had more homicides per capita than any other Canadian city. Metro Edmonton came second. According to StatsCan, the greater Edmonton metropolitan area recorded 47 homicides last year. That gave a rate of 3.39 killings per 100,000 residents. The Thunder Bay region only had eight homicides. But because its population is so much smaller, that worked out to about twice as many murders person, or 6.64 homicides per 100,000 people.

Canada’s murder rate was down slightly last year.

And homicide rates in Alberta were actually down by 14 per cent, with 17 fewer murders than in 2015.

In Edmonton, though, people keep killing.

Of those 47 homicides in metro Edmonton last year, 42 were committed in Edmonton itself.

This year is shaping up to be every bit as bloody. In the City of Edmonton proper, we’ve already had 31 homicides this year.

If there was some pattern to those deaths, we might be able to come up with some kind of coordinated strategy to reduce fatal violence in our community. But patterns aren’t easy to see.

By my rough count, 11 homicides this year have involved stabbings or edged weapons, while another 11 involved guns. The rest involved everything from beatings to poison.

The oldest victim was 67. The youngest was just 11 days old.

Fifteen of the 30 were young men between the ages of 17 and 30. In a city where our population skews young and skews male, we do have a disproportionate demographic of people who are in what you might call their “prime crime” years.

But gender and age aren’t the whole answer.

Most of this year’s homicide victims seem to have been killed by someone they knew: a friend, an acquaintance, a business or criminal associate. Only three appear to have been killed by strangers. In five cases, the person accused is a family member: a partner, parent or adult child.

Drugs and drug-gang violence were at the root of many of these deaths. Alcohol, a legal drug, was at the root of several more. Poverty. Addiction. Mental illness. Systemic racism. I’m sure such factors played a role in many of these tragedies.

Yet few of this year’s murders have captured the public imagination. That may be because police suppress the names of some victims. Many of this year’s victims have seemed anonymous, though, even after we learned their names, because they were already on the margins of our community.

Only one of these crimes has, so far, resulted in a first-degree murder charge. In all the other cases where charges have been laid, the accused face charges of manslaughter or second-degree murder. In other words, few of these crimes were premeditated or carefully planned. Many more were the result of a fight that got out of hand, or some sudden burst of fury. It’s hard to know how to prevent impulse murders, crimes of passion or pique.

Perhaps rage is the most dangerous drug of all. In a popular and political culture that often encourages and validates public tantrums, people have become so used to lashing out in anger, they’ve lost the capacity, or the will, for self-control.

Whatever the reasons, it’s past time for us to stop minimizing the problem. Shrugging off our death toll is bad for our community — and not just its image.

There’s no simple, facile “fix” for our bleak homicide numbers. That doesn’t mean we can afford to be fatalistic about the canker eating away at the soul of our city. Our murder rate isn’t normal. And we shouldn’t normalize it.