While the coronavirus pandemic is making major headlines, another issue that is not receving attention is the issue of officer-involved shootings in Winnipeg. Previously, these shootings happened once every few years. Last year was pretty bad for that. There were 8 officer-involved shootings, seven of them fatal. Not even one third of the way into this calendar year, police have shot 4 people, all of them fatally. In reverse chronological order:
April 18, later identified by family as Stewart Kevin Andrews, 22
This after a year which set a record for homicides in the city, along with the high number of police shootings that happened as well. I don't know what the numbers are like for this year, but it looks like the pandemic is unfortunately not having an impact on taking down serious violent crime numbers in Winnipeg. It's not just a Winnipeg issue either. Last year, Brandon recorded 3 homicides, whereas usually they record one homicide every 2-3 years.
We can't let the pandemic distract us from the fact that there is a public safety crisis happening in our province. We desparately need to invest in our communities to stop this kind of thing from happening. Incarceration is no longer a viable solution, as jails are looking to release as many people as they can to prevent the spread of coronavirus within the institutions. Things are getting very bad. As activist Michael Champagne says:
"It's been many years since I've seen tensions this high between the community and the Winnipeg police," said Michael Champagne, a youth mentor and community organizer.Champagne said Winnipeg's Indigenous community is polarized and people are angry. He wants police to improve communication and is calling for more investments in crime prevention.
"If the police are able to articulate to the community when they show up in a situation that someone has a weapon we have to respond in this way ... then that will better help people in community deal with the police," he said.
"I know that even for myself when I see a police car going by my heart starts beating a little faster."
Champagne believes crime will continue to grow until root causes of poverty and trauma are addressed.
"We have to talk about how we prevent these types of situations from happening before the police are even called, before the police have to give these lethal force situations."
He said in his opinion the relationship between police and the Indigenous community was best between 2013 and 2015, citing the attendance of officers at Meet Me at the Bell Tower events in the North End as an example of how former police chief Devon Clunis led community-based prevention strategies. He said since the chief retired in 2016 it's been harder to get police involved.
"Without those partners supporting community resources to prevent families from falling apart and falling into poverty people not having the education people not having the jobs is going to result in people doing the crime and doing the drugs."
We should disarm the public further.
If police don't feel threatened by citizens then they won't respond with deadly force.
If the public at large was banned from owning/carrying all weapons then the incentive for police to shoot and or feel threatened would decrease significantly.
We could even have police who don't carry guns.
What are you getting at here? Most of the recent officer involved shootings have the police claiming they shot at people who had things like knives, machetes, and other various implements like hammers. I can't off the top of my head think of any shootings where the police claimed those involved had actual guns.
Speaking of officers who pose a threat to public safety in Winnipeg:
The article shows a video clip of the crash. It is absolutely apalling, and it's only sheer luck that nobody died as a result of that crash. I don't care what the officer was responding to, he should have been more careful. Think about what his job entails as a police officer. If he hasn't directly seen carnage brought on by people driving carelessly, he has definitely heard horror stories from colleagues who have. He should have known better.
Regardless of the result of criminal proceedings, he at least deserves to lose his job over this.
So lately we have had problems with random stabbings on the bus and random attacks with hammers. Despite the pandemic, the scary headlines about crime that Winnipeg is used to are still coming at us. The few of us who still move around downtown can see more people sleeping in bus shelters, no doubt a result of reduced shelter capacity due to social distancing requirements. The social ills of our city are laid bare for the few people moving about downtown and paying attention. I look to what is happening in Minneapolis, and am fearful that it's only a matter of time before the same thing happens here.
Both those incidents are horrible. I have no idea how that young lad's recovery is going to go with what has been described as "life-altering" injuries. I only heard the tail end of an abuction and sexual assault on a woman taken form Winnipeg to St. Paul by a pair or group of women. There has been and continues to be lots of tension and aggression in this city. Lot of it is related to class discrimination and racism that have resulted in high incidences of addictions, homelessness and lateral violence. The pandemic situation makes it worse in how support systems have been affected for sure.
I think that Winnipeg's racism is more predominantly focused on Indigenous people. I don't know if riots will happen anytime soon but it's amazing how quick the larger entitled white majority shits on them when they just set up blockades to defend their rights.
Far from uniting the city, the social distancing measures implemented to fight the pandemic are tearing the city apart. Offices have been closed. Major summer events that happen downtown have been cancelled, along with Jets games. The University of Winnipeg has been educating people online, and will continue to do so for months. Restaurants have been closed. That means that many members of the professional class who come into the downtown are separated from that reality. They don't see the social problems as they hide out from the pandemic in the safety of their own homes. Community service organizations that help the urban poor have reduced or outright eliminated volunteer helpers, and with all due respect, that is having an impact on service delivery. Community drop-in centres are closed, and for many people it's the chance to drop in and socialize with people is the greatest need they have. Additionally, panhandlers earnings have declined, as people are simply not around to give cash. All this is no doubt having an impact on physical health, but mental and emotional health as well. This is a perfect envrionment for things like drugs to flourish, along with the social ills that follow. Additionally, given the risks to health of urban poverty, why are the urban poor even worried about coronavirus anyways? There are so many bigger risks to people's health that we have ignored.
You are so right there is little to say about it. I worry for the homeless. We should be scrambling to make sure they all have a roof over their heads for winter across Canada.
Police exercise in Winnipeg under fire:
Why the hell is the Winnipeg Police Service doing that kind of exercise in a city, possibly even tying up their own 911 lines from people calling it in not knowing what was happening? Don't they have enough secure buildings and outdoor facilities in remote rural areas for this exact purpose?
Brandon Police Chief joins Black Lives Matter march:
For context, to get 200 people to an event of that kind in Brandon is a major accomplishment.
Oh Heph, you have been gone a long time. You had to leave Brandon because of the kind of thinking that prevailed there. What would you say if you could see this happening in your former home town?
10,000 people showed up for London, Ontario's protest in support of Black Lives Matter. My youngest (this was her first protest) said they only had 10 cops show up to protect a handful of white suupremacists who were getting the shit kicked out of them by anti-racists protesters. 10,000 for a city the size of London is quite unprecedented.
Let's be honest about something that I think is helping to drive massive turnout at these protests. There's not much else to do, people haven't seen their friends in a long time, and aren't sure when they will see their friends again.
Drugs an issue in smaller communities as well:
The biggest challenge there is that Brandon is very good at pretending these kinds of social problems don't exist in the city, even though they have almost the entire time I have lived there. Lately they have become very strongly evident. I hope that shakes the complacency of the community and they take it more seriously.
Some European countries require many years of training to become police officers. Norway and Finland require three years of training. Iceland police require two years of training. The United States police require between two weeks and six months of training.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/16/viral-image/post-comparing-us-police-training-and-fatal-shooti/
These countries with the highest training standards have the lowest number of shooting and other deaths by police officers. Canada has lower shooting depths per capita then the United States but our training standards lag far behind many other European nations as well.
The United States also lacks national standards for police training.
Talk about adding insult to injury:
Wow. How horrible.
This little bit over the ouster of James Favel from the Bear Clan:
That sounds troubling, and raises the possibility of the Bear Clan being co-opted by the Winnipeg police. When it comes to public safety, there will be alliances between community groups and the police. The problem is that the police should be accountable to the communities they serve, not the other way around. If what Favel says is true, it is very concerning, especially in light of crap like this:
Favel's dismissal certainly doesn't pass the sniff test in my view, especially on the heels of the news of those tweets from Rejeanne Caron, many which sounded racist and led to her stepping down as chair of the Board.
It's not just Winnipeg. Dauphin and Portage la Prairie have also seen murders in their communities this year.
Back in Winnipeg, an officer who shot a robbery suspect last fall has been cleared by the police watchdog.
This announcement from Brandon I don't understand:
I thought that holding cells at the police station were for temporary detention? If someone has to be detained longer, aren't they usually taken to a jail? Brandon has a jail, so why were the funds not directed there instead of towards the police station?
Doesn't this also come at the heels of closing a prison facility in Dauphin? Sounds like some kind of pork-barreling.
I don't know what the internal politics are. I don't know if the PCs have given up on Dauphin, or are trying to throw money at Brandon to distract from the frustration about the recent covid outbreak there.
I do remember that when the closing of the Dauphin facility happened that nobody in the area, even local advocates of restorative justice, thought that was a good idea. Dauphin is a major city, and far away even from some of the catchment area of people who would end up in the Dauphin jail. That makes it very hard to receive visits from loved ones. Now take these inmates even further away, to Brandon or Winnipeg where their loved ones can't reach them, and the only social support they have is other inmates. What do you think that does to their chances of rehabilitation or how likely they are to reoffend upon release?
It doesn't seem like a well-thought decision sadly enough but not surprising.
This is disturbing:
That is surprising and so very upsetting.
Yeah, it's the kind of thing you only expect to happen in big cities. It's true that racism is prevalent in Brandon, but that is shocking even for that city. As the article notes, it was the first time a charge of inciting hatred has ever been laid.
Brandon Police Chief Wayne Balcen actually marched in the Black Lives Matter protest in Brandon last summer. I hope the police service actually follows through on that and does what it can to hold accountable those responsible for this crime.
Not seeing the bigger picture?
Tragedy hits Portage la Prairie for a second time this year:
Meanwile, a positive step for Indigenous men who went through the criminal justice system:
I hope at some point this group can do some sort of mentoring to younger people before the next generation is caught up in that same cycle. Good for them in any case. I wish them all the best.
Guilty plea in Brandon stabbing:
Another police shooting happened today:
How well is this going to go over?
Changes in direction for Porage la Prairie shelter:
We tend to think of Winnipeg being unique in Manitoba in terms of being affected by big city problems like poverty, gangs, homelessness, and crime. The truth is, these problems affect every major urban centre in the province. If the NDP put its mind to it, they would have safe seats in every major city in the province, including Portage la Prairie. The only cities this wouldn't apply to are Steinbach, Morden, and Winkler, as these cities are in the province's Bible Belt, and Bible Belt areas typically do not vote for left-wing politicians. Brandon, Dauphin, Selkirk, The Pas, Thompson, Flin Flon, and Portage should be on the NDP's radar for serious organizing and winning.
Woman rammed in road rage incident caught on camera:
Was this a random act of road rage, or is this a sign that people are starting to crack under the social distancing restrictions?
I think you are reaching given that road rage was fairly common before Covid
Since when is a case of road rage worse than more than tens of thousands dying of Covid or living with the health impairments of Covid?
Are you finally acknowledging that maybe there are negative societal impacts that policy makers need to take into account when they decide what to do about covid? One of those negative impacts is people are stressed, and when they are stressed sometimes they lash out and hurt other people. As Bacchus correctly points out, road rage has happened all the time, but I still think it reasonable to raise the possibility that the 2 are connected.
Policy makers do take into account the societal impacts of their Covid-19 policies. It is a tough balancing act for policy makers because Covid-19 has very serious impacts on society. When will you acknowledge that Covid-19 has very serious impacts on society that policy makers have to deal with?
For heaven sake, just because one thinks that our approach to covid has been unbalanced and is focusing too much on covid at the expense of everything else doesn't mean that person isn't taking it seriously.
Here's a tragic holiday marker:
We are closing in on setting a record for the highest number of homicides in a year. Unfortunately I expect the trend to continue into January, and won't be surprised to see records continue to be broken on both a monthly and annual basis.
Hmm not in Toronto nor other major cities
We have been seeing more headlines about violent crime in Winnipeg in recent years even before the pandemic hit. I expect that trend will continue to accelerate in the New Year, and I expect Winnipeg to see the same kind of open social unrest we saw in places like Minneapolis and Kenosha this past year.
Here's an update: