StatsCan: Sudbury's murder rate one of Canada's lowest

The highest rate of any major city was a dubious distinction held by Regina, where there were nine homicides last year, for a rate of 3.84, followed by Winnipeg, whose rate of 3.26 reflected 26 violent deaths in that city.

In Ontario, Thunder Bay had the highest rate – 2.46, or three murders. Peterborough and Guelph reported none in 2013, joining Moncton, N.B., and the Quebec cities of Sherbrooke and Saguenay as major centres where no homicides were reported last year.

Closer to home, Greater Sudbury Police Staff Sgt. Craig Maki was reluctant to speculate why the city's homicide rate was so low.

“That's a hard question to answer,” Maki said. “Those types of crimes are hard to predict, hard to prevent.”

However, he did say the local police have been working with dozens of community groups, focusing their efforts on trying to prevent crime, rather than just responding to it.

“We are creating new initiatives, creating partnerships with various community agencies in order to, hopefully, identify situations where people may be at elevated risk,” Maki said. “And if they are at elevated risk, with our partners, we intervene.”

The community policing model known as Zone 30 scored a big success two years ago in the Mountain Street area of the city, where officers worked with people in the neighbourhood to gather intelligence on problem areas, and change the view of police from people who are only present when something bad has happened.

Those efforts reduced police calls to the area from several a day to just a handful a month. The model has since been expanded in the city, and has been adopted by other forces across the country.

“It's the future of policing,” Maki said. “We collaboratively get together with the people who are struggling to give them the proper resources and abilities to prevent anything that serious from occurring.

“But there's no one thing we are doing that we could point to that you could arguably say is causing the murder rate in Sudbury to be lower than someplace else. We're hoping that the work we're doing proactively will help us get that trend to continue.”

Earlier this year, police, mental health, addictions and child protection groups established the Rapid Mobilization Table, to broaden the city's information-sharing network and work to identify problems before they become crimes.

“I think any time we establish a partnership with a community group that makes our (city) safer and improves the well-being of the people that live in Sudbury, that's a success,” Maki said. “The Rapid Mobilization Table is where we're partnered with, I believe it's up to 30 agencies now. It's different community groups where we all get together and discuss issues that impact Greater Sudbury as a community.”

The StatsCan report found that, overall, homicide rates were highest in the west and the north. Provincially, Manitoba had the highest homicide rate (3.87 per 100,000 population), followed by Saskatchewan (2.71), Alberta (2.04) and British Columbia (1.66). Nunavut (11.24) and the Northwest Territories (4.59) reported homicide rates higher than any province, while there were no homicides in Yukon for the third consecutive year.

Other trends in the StatsCan report include a drop in gun-related murders, which totalled 131, 41 fewer than in 2012. That's the fewest since 1974.

“While firearm-related homicides decreased in 2013, the number of fatal stabbings grew,” the report said. “There were 195 fatal stabbings, 31 more than in 2012. Stabbings accounted for 40 per cent of all homicides in Canada in 2013.”

And 87 per cent of homicide victims in 2013 were killed by someone they knew, at least of the murders solved by police. As a result, the rate of stranger homicide (0.14 per 100,000 population) was the lowest recorded in over 40 years.

Since 2003, police in Canada have solved about 76 per cent of all homicides. Of these, nearly seven in 10 (69 per cent) were solved within seven days. A further 26 per cent were solved between eight and 364 days, while five per cent were solved one year or more after the incident occurred.

Most cases that are solved take two days before the perpetrator is identified, although gang-related and drug-related killings take longer -- about a week -- StatsCan said.