There have been three murders so far in the first three months of 2015 in Prince George.
Before panicking and thinking we're out to reclaim our undeserved title as the Crime Capital of Canada, let's all take a deep breath.
There were no murders in Prince George in 2014 and just one in 2013. Yet in 2010, there were seven murders in city limits and two more in the surrounding area. One man - Cody Legebokoff - was responsible for three of those murders (his first victim, Jill Stuchenko, was murdered in 2009).
What the recent numbers illustrate, however, is that there can be a lot of variance from year to year. Three murders in the first quarter of 2015 shouldn't be seen as a murder crisis but neither should just one murder in 2013 and 2014 be a sign that homicide investigators are not needed at the local RCMP detachment.
The majority of murders in Prince George are like murders in Vancouver or other Canadian cities, large or small, in that they are targeted killings related to organized crime. A minority of murders are committed by family members. To die at the hands of a relative stranger, particularly a predator like Legebokoff, is the most rare of all.
For the years 2007 to 2011, the last years posted on the Statistics Canada website, there were between 500 and 600 murders per year in Canada, ranking it 21st or 22nd as the cause of death in each of those years. Meanwhile more than 3,600 Canadians killed themselves each of those years (ninth or 10th leading cause of death), so it's six to seven times more likely you'll kill yourself than someone will kill you. You're about 145 times more likely to die from cancer than you are to be murdered in Canada.
The fifth leading cause of death in Canada (and the only one non-health related) is accidents of all kinds. To put that in a Prince George context, there were no local murders in 2014 but four pedestrian deaths. In January of 2014 alone, there were seven deaths on Highway 16.
How the murder numbers are collected also counts.
As Citizen crime reporter Mark Nielsen noted in a 2013 year-in-review story, there was only one murder that year in Prince George but there were two attempted murder investigations and one man was sent to prison for impaired driving causing death. Two men formerly of Prince George were also murdered in 2013, one in Terrace and the other was killed in a gang-related shooting in Coquitlam.
Low risk of death by murder, however, doesn't mean nothing should be done. There is one simple way to decrease the number of murders in Prince George, in Vancouver and across Canada and that's targeting gangs and their members. There are too many other variables to say with certainty that the drop in murders seen in 2013 and 2014 were the result of the gang task force but it certainly didn't make matters worse. Although it's a huge effort in expense and manpower towards just a handful of people, they are the worst of the worst and they are causing the majority of the problem, so it's worth it.
Not everyone sees it that way.
More than a few people take the cynical approach that as long as criminals are killing other criminals, no harm done, but that's wrong on so many levels. Take the murder of Darren Munch in 2010, for example. Munch, a Fort St. John man with a lengthy criminal record, was shot multiple times on a sunny weekend afternoon in August. Nearly five years later, no arrests have been made, meaning there is a killer (or killers), possibly still free, who has not been made accountable for his or her crime. Almost a year to the day later, an innocent bystander was struck by a stray bullet from a daytime gun battle between gang members a block from where Munch was murdered.
Criminals trying to kill each other puts the entire community at risk. Fortunately the bystander was not seriously hurt in 2011 but the result could have been much worse. racking down on gangs means targeting the individuals while also eliminating their sources of income.
The victim of last weekend's murder has been identified as a former bike gang president with an extensive criminal record.
That's a wakeup call that gang activity remains a problem and only relentless ongoing vigilance by police and the entire community will make city streets safer.
