Editorial: Murder can be curtailed

It took nearly six months, but the city has its first murder of 2010.

It’s a sharp contrast to the year before, when the body of William Harvey Atkins was found on Jan. 14 at a Finlayson Street address.

Hopefully it’s a sign that last year was an anomoly, and not an indication of rising violent crime levels in the city.

There were no murders in Thunder Bay in 2008, but police investigated six homocides in 2009.

The crimes sparked an outpouring of protest, with one police union official accusing the department of not taking crime seriously and police chief Robert Herman to lay much of the blame on underlying social conditions.

In many ways, he’s right on the money.

Certainly the police cannot catch spur-of-the-moment crimes in progress. To do so they’d have to have an omnicient view of the world.

The city and province, therefore, must do a much better job treating the factors that lead to crime – poverty and drug addiction leaping to the top of the page.

Wednesday’s victim was a 39-year-old Aboriginal man.

Further efforts must also be made to reach out to First Nations communities, whose citizens suffer far more greatly from problems with addictions than other Ontarians.

Murder will never go away, but there is plenty we can do to ensure the conditions that lead to it are all but eliminated.