‘Inordinate amount of almost gratuitious violence’ People in justice system, social agencies taken aback by number, severity of crimes committed by Winnipeg youths By: Dean Pritchard Posted: 7:08 PM CDT Thursday, Jul. 20, 2023

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This article was published 20/07/2023 (1156 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The stories keep coming, shocking in both their violence and their seeming regularity.

A 14-year-old boy charged with second-degree murder after a 17-year-old boy is stabbed outside Canada Life Centre.

A 12-year-old boy arrested after allegedly slashing a 17-year-old boy in the face with a machete.

“In Manitoba we have a high population of children in care, 10,000 the last time I looked. Typically, these are the kids we see in the system.”–Source

A 16-year-old boy arrested after allegedly robbing and attacking two younger boys at a downtown shopping mall.

And more.

In the past three months, Winnipeg has experienced a spate of violent crimes involving young offenders.

While hard numbers remain difficult to confirm, the level of violence appears on the rise, say justice sources.

“We have an inordinate amount of almost gratuitous violence that there wasn’t before,” one source told the Free Press. “It’s gone to a whole other level that I have never seen.”

But why?

Pandemic-era closures that shut down schools and extracurricular programs “really did a number on our kids,” the source said.

“I think that was a huge piece and we are seeing the fallout from that,” the source said, noting court pre-sentence reports quoting young offenders blaming “boredom” and having nothing to do for why they turned to drugs, gangs and crime.

“These kids need those extra-curricular programs, they need socialization with their peers,” the source said.

The level of violence committed by young offenders, if not the number of incidents, appears to be on the rise, agreed another justice source, who pointed to socio-economic factors as the most telling indicators for criminal involvement.

“In Manitoba we have a high population of children in care, 10,000 the last time I looked,” a “disproportionate” number of them who live in poverty and with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the source said. “Typically, these are the kids we see in the system.”

According to the First Nations Family Advocate Office, approximately 90 per cent of children in care are Indigenous.

“It’s the youth that are, in some ways, inadvertently waving the flag and saying, ‘Yeah, something is wrong, and we are acting out and we need something and we aren’t getting it.’”–Mitch Bourbonniere

The pandemic and resulting social isolation sped up an already darkening forecast for at-risk youth, said youth advocate Mitch Bourbonniere.

“Anecdotally, I would have to agree the last three years have had an impact for sure,” he said. “We’re on a trajectory that was probably heading this way anyway.”

Youth crime is an indicator of a grab bag of social problems that include poverty, homelessness, social isolation, drug use and mental-health issues that affect the city’s broader population, Bourbonniere said.

“It’s the youth that are, in some ways, inadvertently waving the flag and saying, ‘Yeah, something is wrong, and we are acting out and we need something and we aren’t getting it,’” he said. “A lot of young people are left to their own devices, unfortunately. They don’t have the supervision, they don’t have the mentorship…. We have wounded families and wounded communities and that’s a legacy that gets passed on until it can be interrupted and people and families and communities can do their healing.”

A youth can signal they are out of control and need help, but the necessary supports aren’t often available when they’re needed most, said Kent Dueck, executive-director of Inner City Youth Alive.

“We recently had an individual who told us that they were escalating and they were afraid that they were going to kill someone, ‘Could somebody stop me, please?’” Dueck said. “This person, a few days later, was involved in an assault on a youth that we know and it was a group of individuals that attacked a kid, beat them brutally. This person warned us that they were not able to contain their anger and they were worried about what they were going to do.”

Dueck said thoughts of violence permeate the work of Inner City Youth Alive staff.

“If a community is feeling unsafe, you can’t have a vision for the future,” he said. “We have a context now, where everybody literally feels unsafe, in the North End here, so you literally can’t do a damn thing. My cry has been we have to stabilize this or we can’t do anything.

“My staff, we talk about violence every day. We see it in the community, we worry about it when we open the doors. We have a panic button that will call six cruisers in under three minutes that we have used.”

It is too soon to say if youth crime trends are shifting after year-to-year decreases in the number of minors charged with violent crimes between 2016 and 2021, the Winnipeg Police Service said after a 16-year-old boy was arrested last May and charged with injuring four teenage boys with a machete at CF Polo Park.

Contacted for comment Wednesday, a police spokesperson referred a reporter to the WPS 2022 annual report.

“The three markers that concern me are the frequency, the severity and the age of the young people.”–Mitch Bourbonniere

While reported youth crimes steadily declined from 2016 to 2021, last year saw a 43.4 per cent increase over 2021 (1,664 crimes in 2022, up from 1,160 the previous year).

In 2022, youths accounted for 17 per cent of those charged with a violent crime.

“The three markers that concern me are the frequency, the severity and the age of the young people,” said Bourbonniere, who works as a youth mentor with Ogijiita Pimatiswin Kinamatwin, or OPK, a support agency for at-risk Indigenous youth, and with the Downtown Community Safety Partnership.

Bourbonniere said there needs to be better intelligence gathering and information sharing between child and family services, the education system, youth corrections and other stakeholders identifying who is at risk and who needs support.

“It’s happening in pockets; there is some really good work being done in Winnipeg,” including by the Bear Clan and other grassroots volunteer organizations, “but it’s not enough,” he said.

At OPK, Bourbonniere and others work to divert at-risk youth from gangs to pro-social work in the community.

“We have them volunteer with community groups and it brings them self-esteem, it brings purpose and it brings identity and belonging,” he said. “When they can’t find that in the regular systems, they will find each other and create shadow families…. There is no guidance, there is no mentorship, there is no positive role models in those shadow families.”

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca

Dean Pritchard
Courts reporter

Dean Pritchard is courts reporter for the Free Press. He has covered the justice system since 1999, working for the Brandon Sun and Winnipeg Sun before joining the Free Press in 2019. Read more about Dean.

Every piece of reporting Dean produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.