‘We need to pay more attention’

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This article was published 13/12/2022 (700 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a chilling statistic in the deadliest year on record in Winnipeg: eleven teenagers are accused of taking a life.

“It’s horrible, it’s heartbreaking, it’s terrible… I’ve been doing this a lot of years, and it’s not feeling good what’s happening in our community right now — overall, in general, but also with our young people,” said social worker and educator Mitch Bourbonniere on Tuesday.

Three of the 11 are accused in the stabbing death of 28-year-old Tyree Cayer at the downtown library Sunday afternoon, including the youngest accused this year, who is just 14 years old. He is charged with second-degree murder.

In all of 2021, four youths were charged in relation to a homicide.

Ten males and one female have been charged in eight of the 51 homicides this year, a Free Press analysis of Winnipeg police data show.

Two accused, both 15-year-old males, are each charged with two counts of second-degree murder and one count of aggravated assault in relation to three random attacks near the Main Street strip on Aug. 22, including that of a 36-year-old mother, Danielle Dawn Ballantyne, whose body was found in a Jarvis Avenue apartment.

The increase in the number of teens charged in connection to a homicide, and the overall violence in Winnipeg, upsets Bourbonniere, a longtime activist.

He hopes it’s an anomaly tied to the social aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I hope and pray it’s an anomaly. Whether it is or not, we need to double down on our efforts,” he said.

Society must do a better job of supporting young people so they don’t view violence as an option, Bourbonniere said.

“It’s a pretty simple answer. There’s no panacea. The young people who are getting involved in dangerous and violent situations are simply not connected to programs or adults that could help them. They’re floating around out there on their own. As a society, we’re allowing that to happen, more and more,” Bourbonniere said.

“Whether it’s more mentorship programs, more wraparound programs, more youth hubs, more drop-in centres, more youth workers. Whatever it is, we need to pay more attention to young people, especially right now, just with the way everything’s going.”

A Winnipeg Police Service spokeswoman said the most recently available internal statistics show an uptick in youth crime this year, driven primarily by violent youth crime, though details were not available Tuesday.

The latest available 12 months of data, from Sept. 2021 to Aug. 2022, show total youth crime increased by 27 per cent over the same period in 2020 to 2021, but decreased by 31.9 per cent over the five-year average, a police spokeswoman said.

In terms of non-violent crime, the number of incidents committed by youth continue to drop; police statistics from 2016 to 2021 show a significant overall decrease of youth crime.

In 2016, out of 2,312 crimes committed by youth, 836 involved violence, police data show. Not one was a homicide.

One year later, 844 crimes involved violence out of the 2,204 incidents tagged to young offenders. There were nine homicides.

In 2018, Winnipeg had 788 violent youth crimes, three of which were homicides, of 1,909 incidents in total.

There were 770 violent youth crimes, eight of which were homicides, out of a total of 1,938 incidents in 2019.

The number of reported incidents dropped in 2020 and 2021.

In 2020, when the pandemic forced lockdowns and periods in which people’s restrictions were limited, there were 642 violent youth crimes, including four homicides, out of a total of 1,370 incidents perpetrated by young people.

Last year, there were 652 violent incidents involving young offenders, four of which were homicides, out of 1,101 incidents of crime.

“It appears as though violent youth crime is returning to levels more consistent with 2016 and 2017 than with recent years… while non-violent youth crime remains low in historical terms,” the police spokeswoman said.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera