Two murders in thirty minutes. We can relativize. Minimize. Denounce media sensationalism. We can. Montreal, after all, is not on fire.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
We can come up with reassuring figures. According to Statistics Canada, the homicide rate per 100,000 population in the census metropolitan area of Montreal was 1.11 in 2021. In that of Vancouver, it was double: 2.16. Winnipeg’s: 5.39.
And that’s not to mention American cities like St. Louis (65), New Orleans (56) or Detroit (48.6). Montreal, compared to these cut-throats, is the country of the Care Bears.
We can see the steady decline in homicides on the territory of the SPVM: from 85 in 1981, we have fallen to 36 in 2021. Highlighting this decrease makes it possible to measure the progress made – and to put things in perspective.
But for the residents of Montreal North and Rivière-des-Prairies, neighborhoods particularly affected by the recent outbreak of shootings, these figures do not mean much. For them, insecurity cannot be measured in graphs. For them, the fear of taking a stray bullet is experienced daily.
Of course, we can temper. Talk about settling scores. Bikers, mobsters and street gangs kill each other like wolves eat each other. It’s the harsh law of the street.
That’s probably true of the two men shot dead on Tuesday. Both were “known to the police”, as we say in the jargon. But now, one was killed in the crowded parking lot of the Rockland Center and the other, on the terrace of a pizzeria on rue Saint-Denis.
They were murdered in broad daylight. Without the slightest concern for the safety of customers, passers-by, in short, the “ordinary world”. As if the law of the street had lost its rules and its code of honor.
Even more worrying, we are beginning to see the chilling phenomenon of scoringborrowed from the American street: criminals collect points by shooting randomly at passers-by in the territory of a rival gang.
This is perhaps the sad fate reserved for Jayson Colin, riddled with bullets, on the evening of August 10, on the ground of a secondary school in Montreal North. The 26-year-old had nothing to be ashamed of. He was “in the wrong place, at the wrong time”, we lamented.
The next day, a 25-year-old woman was injured in Rivière-des-Prairies. She too in the wrong place at the wrong time, police believe. Just like Thomas Trudel, 16, who was shot in the head on the way home last year in the Saint-Michel district.
There should be no “wrong place, wrong time” in Montreal.
This is not about giving in to panic, but about admitting that Montreal has a problem. To refuse that these shootings become the new reality of the metropolis. To refuse to get used to this violence.
“We will not accept, as a government, that Montreal becomes a shooting range for gangs,” Prime Minister François Legault rightly declared. Of course, there are no miracle solutions to prevent this from happening. But there are things to do.
Legislate first. The federal government must ban handguns once and for all. It must beef up border seizure operations. It must pass laws to more severely punish those who traffic – or manufacture – illegal weapons.
In Quebec, the party leaders must tell us what they intend to do to restore a climate of security in Montreal. It must become a priority electoral issue.
Not to blacken the picture excessively – it’s a risk -, but to discuss what can be done, concretely, to prevent young people from enlisting in criminal gangs.
For the candidates, it is not a question of sinking into a campaign of fear, but of listening to those who live and work in these red light districts. Especially when they talk about the importance of investing in parks, culture, leisure, sports…
By the way, investing in kids is exactly what Jayson Colin was doing before he was shot. This hockey lover wanted to pass on his passion: he had created a league for underprivileged children in the neighborhood. In his own way, he wanted to help change Montreal North.
We won’t give him time.
To prevent further tragedies, we cannot rely solely on prevention. In the short term, repression is also necessary. To reassure the population and restore order, more police must be deployed in the streets.
But police officers, precisely, do not run the streets in Montreal. Union leader Yves Francœur even accused Valérie Plante of having contributed to the departure of dozens of them because of the “lack of concrete support” from his administration for them.
At a press conference on Wednesday, the mayor replied that she had a plan. A bit messy. Not even encrypted. Nothing seemed to be tied up yet. All the same: the City is negotiating with Quebec to finance the hiring of additional police officers. Both levels of government say they are ready to take action to curb armed violence. The political will seems to be there – as if the two murders had provided the electroshock necessary to make things happen.
And so that everyone agrees on the importance of supporting the work of Montreal police officers.