Winnipeg’s homicide rate remains high

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This article was published 28/10/2020 (1955 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With two months left of an all-round grim year, Winnipeg is on pace to surpass last year’s record-breaking number of homicides.

As with so many aspects of life disrupted in 2020, is COVID-19 to blame? Maybe, says a University of Manitoba criminologist, but it will be years before anyone can offer a more definitive answer.

“It’s certainly possible that the pandemic is having some effects,” said Prof. Frank Cormier. “I think a lot of people are aware that everything is in a state of upheaval right now. People’s lives are chaotic and chaos or disruption in people’s lives is a very strong correlate of many kinds of crime, particularly violent crime, including homicides.”

Thirty-nine-year-old Adam Roy Solinger was found injured outside a Furby Street home last week and died, becoming the city’s 38th homicide victim of the year.

In 2019, the deadliest year on Winnipeg streets, the city recorded 44 homicides. At the time of Solinger’s death, the city had recorded five more homicides than the same time last year.

The breaking of normal patterns of behaviour can leave people feeling adrift and anxious, Cormier said, possibly contributing to a higher homicide rate.

“Maybe they have lost their jobs, or their family situation has become chaotic because they are all packed in the house together — those things can result in various coping behaviours which can mean people turning to alcohol or drugs to try to reduce their anxiety or normalize,” Cormier said. “And that’s a very, very strong correlate of violent behavior, particularly homicides.”

Cormier cautioned it could take up to 10 years before enough crime data can be analyzed to determine what is causing rising homicide numbers and whether they are a “trend” or a “blip.”

“Then we can start looking at controlling or eliminating certain variables and we can we try to narrow down what we believe was behind it,” he said.

Unlike other crimes, such as property offences that can more easily be tied to specific causes like a poorly performing economy, homicides are most often an “irrational event,” making them much harder to pin down statistically, Cormier said.

Homicides are “almost always committed under the influence of alcohol or drugs… virtually always in the heat of the moment, in extreme anger,” Cormier said.

Further complicating matters, many serious assaults could just as easily be homicides, but for bad aim, speedy medical intervention or other factors.

“The line between an aggravated assault and homicide can be a very, very fine one,” he said. “We can almost put the (most serious) assaults in with the homicides, put them all in the same bucket and maybe look at them that way, which might get us much better and more comprehensive information.”

Thirty-eight homicides is “a shocking and terrible number,” Cormier said, but still a small one, statistically speaking, making it difficult to draw conclusions from one year to the next.

“That makes it even more challenging to ferret out the variables that are contributing (to the homicide rate),” he said. “The larger the sample size, the more data we have, the more accurate we can be.” 

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca