The Black Rod

When did the magic die? A week ago the Winnipeg police department delivered the bad news---crime in the city is out of control. The picture painted by the numbers (for 2018) was appalling. Robberies up ten percent in  a single year.  (And that was the good news.) Property crimes were up almost 20 percent.  Total crime was 33 percent higher than the five year average. The measure of violent crime in Winnipeg had soared to a rating of 161.  Only four years earlier it stood at 116. That's a 38 percent deterioration in safety. How did it happen? How, when in 2015 the police and Winnipeg's police board announced they had discovered the magic solution to crime? "Smart Policing" they called it.    A team of crime analysts would pore through data to spot crime hot-spots and as soon as they identified a trend (car thefts, muggings, liquor store robberies) they could call in police resources to descend on the problem a...

Former Winnipeg police chief Devon Clunis weathered a lot of ridicule when he talked about the role of  prayer in fighting crime. Well, look who's laughing now? Winnipeggers have taken his words to heart, and they're praying up a storm. People are praying they don't get shot. Or murdered. Or robbed at work. Or mugged on the street. Or have their cars stolen. A perusal of the police department's Crimestat page shows the dismal legacy of Clunis' hug-a-thug social work policing, which has been embraced whole-heartedly by the Winnipeg police commission and new police chief Danny Smythe.  The stats compare this year to last, New Year's Day to April 15: Homicides, 9 this year, 6 last. Shootings, up 82 percent.  A whopping 31 this year, 17 last. Commercial robberies, up 53 percent to 150 this year, 98 last. Muggings, 336 this year, 261 last, an increase of 29 percent. Commercial break-ins, 355 compared to 245 in '16.  (A 45% increase.) Res...

Last week's release of the annual report on crime and disorder in the city put a lot of things in  a new perspective---starting with the surprise retirement of the police chief and ending with an abrasive member of the police board getting the hook. Back in March, Police Chief Devon Clunis made a stunning announcement---he was quitting.  Only 52, he was retiring after 29 years as a cop. He had been in the top job barely 3 l/2 years, though, which is why people were so surprised he was anxious to leave.    Anxious to leave. That's a polite way to say bolting for the exit.   Clunis made a big noise when he was hired as police chief.  He was literally going to change the culture of policing, he declared.  Fighting crime was so yesterday, he sneered. He was going to mobilize entire communities, heal social ills, and --- wait for it --- eliminate the root causes of crime. Well, he changed the mission statement, which is on Pa...

Winnipeg bloggers have cracked big stories twice this month, teaching the mainstream media a painful lesson about citizen journalism. Perhaps the most oblivious to what was happening right under their collective noses were the "professional" journalists at the Winnipeg Free Press which has been patting itself on the back for becoming a partner with the Winnipeg Foundation in a project to "train and empower citizen journalists". Menno Zacharias blogs at Policing, Politics and Public Policy. (Can we have a contest to find him a better name for his blog. Please.) Naturally, as a retired deputy police chief, he still has an interest in what's going on with the Force. So when the WPD released its 2010 annual report in December, Menno pulled out his Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass. Now, Zacharias is Old School. That means he can add, subtract, multiply and divide. And he knows how to read. And while going over the numbers provided by the police servi...

So you're the police chief in Murderpeg. Four years after you got the job, the city is setting a record in the number of homicides, StatsCan has named us the most violent city in Canada , and Pollyanna the Mayor is fighting with the national airline that says downtown is too dangerous to bunk its crews overnight. The murder rate would be double if it wasn't for the skill of the medical professionals who keep saving the lives of the daily victim of a shooting or stabbing. The Rock Machine is fighting the Hell's Angels while street gangs have overrun half the city. And a spree killer is still on the loose a year after he gunned down one man outside a house, one man inside a house and gut-shot a teenaged girl on the street for no reason except to see her die. (She lived.) Wouldn't you know it, the uppity politicians and public started asking what you were going to do about it. Apparently a helicopter that keeps communities awake half the night isn't en...

More than a year ago, in a blog post, retired Deputy Chief Menno Zacharias ripped back the curtain from some of the most secret inner workings of the Winnipeg Police Service. What he wrote was astonishing---and never more relevant than today, on the heels of Police Chief Keith McCaskill's much anticipated crime strategy. Perhaps shocked at breaching the blue code of silence, Zacharias later refused to give more details and never returned to the point despite our best prodding. The mainstream media ignored his comments entirely. To put his observations in context you need to know that it's been 15 years since New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his hand-picked police commissioner Bill Bratton wrote the book on fighting crime in the big city. Proving that their method wasn't a fluke, Bratton later moved right across the country to Los Angeles and recreated his success in reducing the crime rate by phenomenal amounts. Giuliani and Bratton designed ...

Chances are you've been talking a lot about crime lately. What with a triple shooting in Transcona and a teenager stabbed in a public park this week, shots fired as two ethnic groups faced off in Osborne Village last week moments before one man was stabbed to death on the street, and a summer of arsons spreading fear throughout Fort Rouge and St. James. No wonder we're the violent crime capital of the country according to Stats Canada. What you don't know, is that it's much, much worse than you think. Statistics Canada divides its annual crime stats into two parts. There's the crime severity index and the violent crime severity index, which get confusing if you don't speak Bureaucrat. The crime severity index is the number of crimes reported to police in a city and the violent crime severity index is a measure of how serious those crimes are. So a city may have a lot of shoplifting and vandalism, and place high in the crime ...