If the city’s homicide rate continues at this pace, Winnipeg is headed for a grim milestone.
The homicide on Edison Avenue in North Kildonan Monday marks the city’s 20th of the year — more than double the number of killings at this time last year.
By mid-May 2021, the city had only seven homicides. Winnipeg is currently on pace to break the record of 44 in 2019.
Const. Jay Murray told 680 CJOB’s The Start that as life slowly returns to normal after years of pandemic restrictions, police are trying to determine which trends might be here to stay.
“It’s been quite shocking for us. It’s certainly contributed to a lot of fatigue in our homicide unit and other units that assist on these types of calls,” he said.
“It’s a number that we’re not proud of — it’s a number we’d like to see trend downwards.
“We’re still trying to identify what is driving it.”
And homicides aren’t the only crime on the rise in Winnipeg.
“Carjackings have been up since about right around that 2018-2019 period,” Murray said.
“At the same time, other types of property crime rose at that point. We’ve also seen things such as firearms — we’re seizing more firearms than we’ve ever seized before.”
A decade ago, Murray said, police would seize, on average, one sawed-off shotgun each day. In 2022, that average number is closer to 2.5 per day.