Secrecy on homicides an injustice to victims, city
Editor’s note: The following originally ran in the Edmonton Journal on Dec. 28 and is reprinted here with permission. It’s timely, because the Penticton RCMP last week revealed a mystery homicide about which it has refused to disclose any details.
IEdmonton Journal t’s a murder mystery of a most peculiar kind — the homicide that police just won’t discuss. On Dec. 19, in his annual year-end interviews with the local media, Edmonton police Chief Rod Knecht casually added another, previously unrevealed, homicide to the city’s running tally of culpable death.
“I asked this morning, and I said, ‘What are we at?’ ” Knecht told reporters. “Because I thought it was 40, actually. And we’re at 41. I had it double-checked. We’re at 41, as of today.”
It was an odd statement. Was this a homicide that the chief himself hadn’t known about? Was he supposed to announce the death this way, or was it a slip?
Certainly, Knecht’s off-handed comment was the first time journalists learned about this new death. Unfortunately, that’s all we know. More than a week later, the media relations office of the Edmonton Police Service still refuses to release any more information about this mysterious case.
Police won’t tell us who died. It’s not just the name they’re keeping a secret. We don’t know the person’s age, so we have no way of knowing whether the victim was a baby, a senior, a teenager, a young adult.
Police won’t release the victim’s gender, either. Before the chief’s interview, EPS had told journalists that 32 of this year’s homicide victims were male and eight were female. After the interview, revised numbers on the EPS website showed 33 males had been homicide victims. We might deduce that this new victim was male. Still, police won’t confirm it.
The police won’t say when this person died. Maybe it was last week. Or perhaps he — if it is a he — died months and months ago, and the death was only recently ruled a homicide. We just don’t know. How did this person die? Gunshot? Stabbing? Was the victim beaten to death? Strangled? Smothered? Poisoned? Run over by a car?
Was the victim killed at home? In a back alley? Outside a bar? In the library with a candlestick? Your guess is as good as mine. Police insist they need to keep all this basic information completely confidential because the investigation is at a “very sensitive stage.”
Releasing any more data, police told me Wednesday, could compromise the “integrity of the investigation.” Whatever that means. It’s a truly unprecedented degree of confidentiality, even for the EPS. The service has become much more secretive in the last 12 months.
Before 2017, it was standard practice for the Edmonton police to release the names of homicide victims. This year, there was a striking departure in protocol, with police routinely refusing to release names.
The EPS offered various explanations for this new policy. Sometimes, they said they were refusing to release the names to protect the families of victims.
Other times, they blamed Alberta’s privacy legislation, insisting — creatively, if erroneously — that provincial law forbade them from naming the dead.
But murder isn’t a private act. It is not a crime against one person. It is an assault on the peace of the community.
And Edmonton’s extraordinarily high homicide rate is a symptom of a larger social malaise. How can we hope to reduce violent crime, if we can’t keep track of who’s being killed and in what circumstances? How do we hold police accountable, if we don’t know what they’re investigating?
Sure, we may learn some of their names from court records, if charges are laid in their deaths. But if no one is ever arrested, they could remain anonymous forever.
John Donne wrote that we should “never send to know for whom the bell tolls” — because it tolls for all of us. Each man’s death, he said, diminishes us, for we are involved in mankind.
But with all due respect to Donne, one of my favourite poets, the death of one anonymous person affects us differently than the death of a person whose name we can know, whose photo we can see.
That’s just how we’re wired as human beings. We respond when we know the dead person’s story, when their lives become real to us.
When we don’t know who died, or how, it’s easy to go on with our lives without missing a beat.
Why shouldn’t we look away when police tell us there’s nothing to see?
But any homicide victim’s death diminishes our community because we are involved in Edmonton.
And we should be able to remember them, not just as numbers, but as real people who lived, and died, among us.