Raise a glass. Some good news about crime for a change.

Six months in, and the biggest good news story of the year is going unreported.

What would you say if we told you that crime in Winnipeg had dropped 26 percent in one year?

Well, don't get excited, because we can't make that statement.

But we can say that there's been a 26 percent drop in the ten crimes surveyed by the police department's Crimestat service.

That's a huge improvement and its not driven solely by a phony drop in car thefts. (Phony because there was no legitimate reason for the sky-high level of car theft in Winnipeg in the first place. To credit anyone with reducing car theft is like congratulating the local arsonist for setting fewer fires this year. If the provincial NDP, judges and probation officials had done their job, there would have been no car theft epidemic.)

The single dark cloud over the good news is in Crimestat is the likelihood we may recapture the unwanted title of Murder Capital of Canada again.

Winnipeg's 16 homicides to date is double what we had last year (2010) at the end of June.

So what else is new? What's the good news, you ask.

House break-ins down 22 percent. Ditto garage break-ins, with business break-ins down 21 percent.

Shootings down 45 percent (18 compared to 33 last year).

Muggings down 5 percent. Even if that's a reflection of fewer reports to police, it demonstrates muggings haven't gone up and that can't be bad.

Auto theft is down 29 percent. That's not the best news. Attempted auto theft is down a whopping 54 percent. The punks aren't even trying to steal cars anymore.

Sexual assault---no change.

Only robbery of businesses shows an increase---4 percent. Sounds bad but that's only 3 more places robbed than last year at this time.

The good news extends to the area level.

District 3
Most improved--the North End. Crimestat offences down 32 percent.

House break-ins in District 3 were down an amazing 30 percent.

Garage break-ins down 29 percent. Commercial break-ins down 33 percent.

Shootings, six compared to 22 last year.

Even robberies were down 12 percent, although muggings were up 2 percent.

Car theft? Attempted (201) down FIFTY PERCENT. Actual thefts (168) down 36 percent.

District 1
Most in need of improvement---the Inner City. Crimestat offences down only 9 percent.

Half the homicides to date (8) occurred in District 1. Last year they registered only 2 before Canada Day.

Garage break-ins up 23 percent. House break-ins, little change (-1 percent).
Robberies up 28 percent. Muggings down 4 percent.

Attempted car theft. Down 48 percent (to 87). Successful auto thefts (142) down 22 percent.

District 2
Needs special attention---St. James-Assiniboia.

Crimestat offences down 23 percent, but a pair of troubling increases should raise red flags. Garage break-ins (130) were up 37 percent and muggings up 15 percent (bad percentage-wise but number-wise only 47 compared to 41 a year ago).

District 2 showed the biggest drop in attempted car theft, 62 percent. Actual thefts were cut in half.

What's behind the improved stats?
Is it the heightened police presence in the North End following last November's double murder by a spree killer who has never been caught?

http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2010/10/is-this-clue-to-catch-winnipegs-spree.html
http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-have-police-nothing-to-report-on.html

Has the addition of extra police officers (200 more since 2004) reached a tipping point?

One factor can be ruled out immediately. It wasn't because of more social workers and a 26 percent reduction in poverty in the city. If you believe the usual hug-a-thug crowd and poverty industry promoters, there's been no reduction in poverty in years.

It will take a closer examination of the stats to hone in on the reason for the drop in crime. Somebody wake the professional journalists from their naps.

The unreported bombshell conspiracy evidence in the Trudeau/SNC-Lavelin scandal

Wow. No, double-wow. A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist-- Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post--- has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story. The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It's bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money. The Trudeau-Snc-Lavalin scandal is...

Crips and Bloodz true cultural anchors of Winnipeg's aboriginal gangs

(Bebo tribute page to Aaron Nabess on the right, his handgun-toting friend on the left) At least six murder victims in Winnipeg in the past year are linked to a network of thuglife, gangster rap-styled, mainly aboriginal street gangs calling themselves Crips and Bloods after the major black gangs of L.A. The Black Rod has been monitoring these gangs for several months ever since discovering memorial tributes to victim Josh Prince on numerous pages on Bebo.com, a social networking website like Myspace and Facebook. Josh Prince , a student of Kildonan East Collegiate, was stabbed to death the night of May 26 allegedly while breaking up a fight. His family said at the time he had once been associated with an unidentified gang, but had since broken away. But the devotion to Prince on sites like Watt Street Bloodz and Kingk Notorious Bloodz (King-K-BLOODZ4Life) shows that at the time of his death he was still accepted as one of their own. Our searches of Bebo have turned up another five ga...

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. There, we said it.

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. Oh, you won't find anyone official to say it. Yet . Like relatives trying to appear cheery and optimistic around a loved one that's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the people in power are in the first stage of grief -- denial. The prognosis for Hydro was delivered three weeks ago at hearings before the Public Utilities Board where the utility was seeking punishingly higher rates for customers in Manitoba. It took us this long to read through the hundred-plus pages of transcript, to decipher the coded language of the witnesses, to interpret what they were getting at, and, finally, to understand the terrible conclusion. We couldn't believe it, just as, we're sure, you can't--- so we did it all again, to get a second opinion, so to speak. Hydro conceded to the PUB that it undertook a massive expansion program--- involving three (it was once four) new dams and two new major powerlines (one in the United States)---whi...

Nahanni Fontaine, the NDP's Christian-bashing, cop-smearing, other star candidate

As the vultures of the press circle over the wounded Liberal Party of Manitoba, one NDP star candidate must be laughing up her sleeve at how her extremist past has escaped the scrutiny of reporters and pundits. Parachuted into a safe NDP seat in Winnipeg's North End, she nonetheless feared a bruising campaign against a well-heeled Liberal opponent. Ha ha. Instead, the sleepy newspeeps have turned a blind eye to her years of vitriolic attacks on Christianity, white people, and police. * She's spent years bashing Christianity as the root cause of all the problems of native people in Canada. * She's called for a boycott of white businesses . * And with her Marxist research partner, she's smeared city police as intransigent racists . Step up Nahanni Fontaine, running for election in St. John's riding as successor to the retiring Gord Macintosh. While her male counterpart in the NDP's galaxy of stars, Wab Kinew, has responded to the contro...

Exposing the CBC/WFP double-team smear of a hero cop

Published since 2006 on territory ceded, released, surrendered and yielded up in 1871 to Her Majesty the Queen and successors forever. Exposing the CBC/FP double-team smear of a hero cop Some of the shoddiest journalism in recent times appeared this long August weekend when the CBC and Winnipeg Free Press doubled teamed on a blatant smear of a veteran city police officer. In the latest example of narrative journalism these media outlets spun stories with total disregard for facts that contradicted the central message of the reports which, simplified, is: police are bad and the system is covering up. Let's start with the story on the taxpayer funded CBC by Sarah Petz that can be summed up in the lead. "A February incident where an off-duty Winnipeg officer allegedly knocked a suspect unconscious wasn't reported to the province's police watchdog, and one criminologist says it shows how flawed oversight of law enforcement can be." There you have it. A policeman, not ...

Winnipeg needs a new police chief - ASAP

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...

The Black Rod

Search This Blog