Number of homicides in Manitoba RCMP jurisdictions nearly double 2023 total

The number of homicides in remote and rural parts of Manitoba this year is nearly double the amount recorded last year, RCMP say.

There have been 55 homicides so far this year in Manitoba RCMP jurisdictions, a jump from the 30 homicides and three suspicious deaths recorded in the entirety of 2023, police spokesperson Sgt. Paul Manaigre said.

This week alone, RCMP's major crimes unit has responded to new homicides in Portage La Prairie, Thompson and Canupawakpa Dakota First Nation, he said.

"We have multiple major crime services teams in various parts of the province at this point now," he told CBC News Tuesday.

"It's just crazy … our major crimes [unit], they're being run off their feet right now."

In the last week, there's been four homicides within RCMP coverage area in Manitoba, which excludes communities like Winnipeg and Brandon with their own police forces. 

On Monday, a 42-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman were found dead inside a home in Portage la Prairie and are believed to have been the victims of a targeted double homicide.

RCMP is also treating the death of a 37-year-old man, whose body was found on Canupawakpa Dakota Nation in western Manitoba last Saturday, as a homicide.

And homicide investigators are examining the death last Thursday of a 28-year-old man in Thompson, where a 31-year-old man was stabbed to death four days later.

Rise not necessarily a trend: criminologist

The data also shows 2022 had the second-highest number of homicides recorded in RCMP jurisdictions in the past five years, sitting at 38.

Despite this year's spike, a criminologist said the numbers have to be examined with caution.  

"It's quite a striking number … but a difference like that is not necessarily a trend," said Frank Cormier, a criminologist at the University of Manitoba.

"It could be an anomaly, and it might not mean anything at all." 

Over the decades, there's been years with a spike in the number of homicides, Cormier said, but the occasional jump is to be expected because of the "rather random nature of homicides." 

"Most of our homicides are very much spur of the moment. They're not people rationally choosing to kill somebody else."

But Cormier said a shared factor likely at play behind this year's homicides is Manitoba's changing economic situation, including high rates of unemployment contributing to a spike in drug abuse and alcohol consumption, both "very highly correlated with violent crimes."

In rural Manitoba, he said, the agriculture industry has been dealt with a string of challenges stemming from pandemic, and over time these and other economic stressors can spill into interpersonal relationships, increasing the rates of intimate partner and domestic violence.

"Somewhere around 85 per cent of people who are killed are killed by someone that is very close to them," Cormier said.

Another common denominator in Manitoba's homicides this year is likely the involvement of criminal and gang activity, which Cormier said is also tied to stressful economic conditions.