City’s record homicide levels ‘disgusting’; activist

After a deadly shooting early Saturday set a grim new record of 45 people slain in Winnipeg in just over 10 months, the current rate suggests the city will record more than 50 homicides by the new year.

Homicides are notoriously difficult to predict, a police source said Sunday, but the city is “unfortunately” on pace to exceed 50 killings by year’s end.

Longtime community activist Sel Burrows said that based on statistics alone, the prior record will likely be shattered, not just surpassed.

“It’s absolutely disgusting,” he said Sunday.

“We’re going to have 50 deaths — murder — easy, and that’s not even looking at the attempted murders. These are human beings who are dying. Some of them may have pretty rough lives, but they’re still human beings and it is totally, totally unacceptable in a modern city like Winnipeg that we have a death rate like that.”

On Sunday afternoon, the Winnipeg Police Service publicly identified the 21-year-old man who was shot on an Exchange District street early Saturday morning as Tristan James Raynard Asham.

Police rushed to the 200 block of McDermot Avenue at about 2:20 a.m. for a reported shooting, where they found Asham with a gunshot wound to his upper body. Officers and paramedics gave him emergency medical care, police said on Saturday, but he died in hospital of critical injuries.

The homicide unit has not made any arrests, said police, who’ve asked anyone with information on the slaying to call investigators at 204-986-6508 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 204-786-8477.

On Sunday, the police tape and evidence markers that lined McDermot Avenue between Albert and Main streets a day before had been removed, but a memorial to the victim remained on the street’s south sidewalk.

Lit candles, a stuffed teddy bear and flowers sat on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant and lounge, where three balloons — two hearts and a star — were taped to the front facade. Two poster boards read “rest in peace Tristan,” along with messages of love and grief and photographs of Asham.

The fatal shooting is another in a spate of violence that has wracked Winnipeg streets in recent months.

“We certainly have seen an increase of violent crime in Winnipeg,” Winnipeg Police Service spokesman Const. Claude Chancy said Saturday. “The numbers of… homicides that we are currently experiencing is sort of a reflection of that trend.”

Winnipeg’s year-end homicide count was 43 in both 2021 and 2020, which only includes slayings investigated by city police, rather than including killings that fell under RCMP jurisdiction.

Burrows believes the new bleak number is a sign of the wider violence in Winnipeg.

“The murder rate is strictly a symbol, it’s the canary in the coal mine, it tells you how much worse all the other violent crime is,” he said.

To address the rate, he said, governments need to address poverty and despair, provide recreation and job opportunities for disenfranchised inner-city youth, improve access to addictions treatment while police go after criminals who peddle poisonous drugs and exploit people, and find repeat violent offenders.

But most importantly, he said, the community has to be involved.

University of Manitoba criminologist Frank Cormier cautioned Sunday against reading too deeply into the rate.

“A person’s dead, and everything that goes along with that is very, very bad,” the professor and researcher said.

“But statistically, we’re still talking about very small numbers.”

He noted the typical Winnipeg homicide is committed by people who know one another while intoxicated.

Cormier said ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic — increased social isolation, reduced income, job loss and generalized trauma — are tied to increased feelings of fear, anger and desperation, which are in turn connected to increasing drug and alcohol abuse.

“(As a result), I’m not terribly surprised that we’re seeing some excess, above-the-norm homicides over the past number of years,” he said.

Gang violence and the increased use of firearms, which are far deadlier than other means of homicide, also play a role, Cormier said.

“What we know is that people whose needs are met, people that have a decent life, very rarely get involved in any kind of crime — and that’s where we need to look,” he said of a means of addressing violence.

The latest homicide didn’t mark a shocking milestone, the University of Winnipeg’s criminal justice department chair said in an email Saturday.

“I’d argue (this year’s number is) part of a trend that has been in the making for quite some time,” Kelly Gorkoff wrote in an email. “(It’s) a record that could be interrupted.”

Child poverty, colonialism, cost of living, lack of access to affordable housing and substance abuse services, and lack of access to community supports and health care are among the drivers of crime, Gorkoff said.

“Social determinants of homicide are more apparent in Winnipeg,” she wrote.

The previous record of 44 homicides was recorded in 2019. Three years ago, the last slaying of the year was committed just days before New Year’s Eve, when Winnipeg police found a 54-year-old man dead from stab wounds at a Highwater Path home in Inkster Gardens on Dec. 27.

The first homicide in 2022 was recorded just over two weeks into the year, with an average of 4.4 killings a month from January to October.

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Twitter: @erik_pindera