THUNDER BAY – The city’s continued entrenchment at the top of national rankings for violent crime indicators doesn’t come as a surprise to the Thunder Bay's police chief.
For the third consecutive year, and fourth time in the last five years, Thunder Bay carried the macabre title of the country’s murder capital in Statistics Canada’s annual police-reported crime data for 2018, which was released on Monday.
Thunder Bay was also near the top of the national rankings for violent crime severity index, only narrowly trailing Winnipeg. Thunder Bay’s violent crime severity index score – 159.68 – was the city’s highest in the past five years, a 12 point increase from the previous year.
“If you look at the overall numbers, not really much has changed in terms of our rankings,” Thunder Bay city police chief Sylvie Hauth said on Tuesday. “The last few years we’ve remained fairly stable, not that it’s a good thing, but we’ve remained pretty much on par for our numbers pretty much annually in terms of our rankings.”
The city’s eight homicides in 2018 represented a rate of 6.38 incidents per 100,000 people, more than twice the per capita figure for second-place Brantford, Ont. for all Canadian census metropolitan areas.
Thunder Bay previously had seven homicides in 2017, eight in 2016 and a high of 11 in 2014. The only time the city didn’t hold Canada’s murder capital title was in 2015, when there were three murders.
“These are reactive in nature. They are types of incidents that the police respond to, as opposed to being (proactive) or preventative in nature,” Hauth said.
“We’ve seen an increase here in Thunder Bay, not only our socioeconomic issues but really a big increase in terms of drugs and gangs within the community. I think a lot of those situations fuel or often contribute to some of the violent crimes we see happening here locally.”
The city’s weighted clearance rate, which calculates the ability of police service’s to solve cases while factoring in the severity of the crimes, is Thunder Bay’s lowest in the last five years.
Hauth attributed that to three murder investigations from 2018 that remain outstanding.
“In the past years, our clearance rates have been almost 100 per cent or very close to,” Hauth said. “The fact that we have three homicides that are still being worked on from last year does have an impact on the overall percentage.”
Hauth said the police service doesn’t just wait for the annual release of statistics to monitor emerging trends along with plans to respond.
“(Last fall) we saw a big increase in terms of violent crimes. We knew they were attributable to some of the guns and gangs, the gangs specifically coming here in Thunder Bay,” Hauth said. “We wanted to make sure that we were starting to address them very aggressively and you saw the creation of the task force to respond to that.”
Statistics Canada also contributed the city's increased violent crime severity index score to an increased number of attempted murders, robberies, break and enters and trafficking, production or distribution of cannabis.
