THUNDER BAY – Thunder Bay’s high rate of homicides stayed steady in 2019, with seven reported for the year. It marks the fourth year in a row with between seven and eight homicides for the city.
Thunder Bay Police acknowledged the city has a high violent crime index, but say they believe the city is still a safe place for most residents. Insp. John Fennell praised officers for their response to the year’s homicides.
“Their clearance rates [compared to] national stats are very, very high,” he says. “All [of the cases] are solved, all are currently before the courts.”
Fennell says responding to a higher rate of homicides than most other Canadian cities puts a strain on the force, in terms of its demands on manpower and the emotional toll it can take on officers.
Thunder Bay has been widely referred to as the murder capital of Canada in recent years. The city has had the highest per capita homicide rate of any Canadian city of over 100,000 for three years in a row, and four of the last five.
A preliminary look at the figures suggest the city is likely to stay at the top of that list for 2019, though it will be several months before Statistics Canada releases official numbers.
In 2018, Thunder Bay’s rate of 6.38 homicides per 100,000 residents nearly doubled the next closest cities of Brantford (3.36) and Regina (3.1).
Police say one major factor in the trend is consistent – the use of intoxicating substances.
“Generally in this community, intoxicants are a huge involvement with our homicides, whether it be drugs or alcohol,” says Insp. John Fennell.
Fennell notes the service is doing a lot of work to prevent the flow of illegal drugs into the city from places like Toronto, but it remains a challenge.
“The difficulty with that is, we educate these guys every time they go to court,” he says. “They learn the police technique that caught them. The difficulty for us now is to come up with different strategies, different ways to catch them.”
