‘Way too many’: Ottawa already ahead of last year’s homicide total

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Ottawa has more homicide victims so far this year compared to all of 2023.

Data provided by the Ottawa Police Service shows the city has seen 20 homicides this year in 15 incidents so far this year. Throughout 2023, there were 16 homicides in 15 incidents.

The March 6 mass killing of a Barrhaven family, including four children, accounts for one of the deadliest homicide events in the city’s history.

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Multiple homicides and violent crimes have recently occurred in the nation’s capital something Ottawa police chief Eric Stubbs called “concerning,” but he noted trends of various types of crimes tend to rise and fall throughout the year, and the frequency of shootings is currently down year-over-year.

Stubbs recently told reporters that there have been 43 shootings so far this year, which is 25.8 per cent lower compared to the 58 shootings that occurred between January and September 2023.

Since Sept. 12, Ottawa has seen four stabbings, one of which was fatal, and another four shootings, two of which were fatal.

“2024 has been a busy time for the homicide unit,” he told reporters earlier this week, saying the number of homicides is “way too many.”

An Algonquin College study reviewing homicides from 2010-2020 says Ottawa’s homicide rate has been steadily creeping up since 2010, with one particularly deadly year.

The report shows Ottawa saw 126 total homicides during that decade, with the violent crime peaking in 2016, when the city saw 24 homicides, a significant jump than seven the year prior and more than 14 seen the year after.

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“Prior to the spike in homicide cases reported in Ottawa in 2016, the city averaged 8.5 homicides per year from 2010-2015. The 24 cases recorded in 2016 represented the sharpest increase in homicide rates Ottawa had seen in decades,” the report says.

The report says OPS statistics show the 2016 spike in homicides in was an “anomaly with few to no factors linking multiple cases.” However, the report says, “OPS did conclude that gang affiliation accounted for a significant portion of Ottawa’s homicides in 2016, with the guns and gangs unit processing 10 gang-related homicides.”

From 2010-2015, the city saw an average of 8.5 homicides per year. After the jump in 2016, from 2017 until 2020, homicide rates in Ottawa levelled out slightly, but were still higher than previous years, with an average of 13 homicides per year.

Since then, too, the average number of homicides per year has continued to slightly increase. From 2020 until 2023, Ottawa averaged 14.5 homicides per year, according to OPS data.

In 2019, Ottawa had a homicide rate of 1.19 per 100,000 people, lower than the country-wide homicide rate of 1.8 per 100,000 and Toronto’s rate of 2.03 per 100,000, for that year.

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As for shootings, between 2018 and 2023, there were 413 in total, or an average of 68 per year. During that period, 2020 was the year with the fewest amount of shootings, with 46. That was followed by the highest year for shootings, when 82 occurred in 2021.

When it comes to the most recent rash of violent crime, Stubbs said the police force is committed to solving the crimes, and it’s “impossible to say” if any of the recent violent incidents are linked or not.

“We know some of them are isolated events, and some we dive deeper into to find that linkage,” he said, adding the investigations were in their early stages.

He added that police, “when we have time,” also work proactively to prevent violent crime, mostly by keeping tabs on the city’s most prolific offenders.

Irvin Waller, criminology professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, says the city needs to think differently about crime suppression.

“Police react to crime, they are not the way of stopping crime from rising,” he said in an interview. “We’ve been increasing police budgets, marginally increasing the number of police. We need to start doing things that are well established to reduce trends in serious crime.”

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Those strategies include youth outreach programs, particularly ones that target young men and boys who tend to be involved in violence, he said, as well as outreach workers visiting hospital emergency rooms to assist victims of gun violence.

He noted the “Glasgow model,” which reduced violent crime in the Scottish city — once Europe’s murder capital — by 50 per cent over the course of a decade. The strategy emphasized treating violence as a public health crisis with an eye to prevention rather than punishment.

“The real question is, why isn’t the city being more proactive?” Waller said.

Late in the evening of Thursday, Sept. 12, a Montreal man was stabbed and killed in the ByWard Market. Police identified the victim as Stephen Pedicelli, 45, of Montreal, and said they had charged Jean-Paul Theragene, 31, of Ottawa, with second-degree murder.

A few hours later, police responded to a separate stabbing in the 300 block of Bank Street at about 5:45 a.m. on Friday morning. They found one person with non-life-threatening injuries near Somerset Street.

A shooting occurred later that weekend, on the corner of Nepean and Percy streets in Centretown on Sept. 15, at approximately 9:45 p.m. The victim was 17-year-old Quentin Dorsainvil, a talented defensive lineman from Ottawa. Police reported that a second victim, Dorsainvil’s brother, also suffered non-life-threatening injuries and was released from hospital. Police said one person was in custody for firearm offences, but said they were still investigating whether those were related to the shooting.

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A few days later, Ahmed Salim-Al-Badri, 34, was shot dead on Heron Road on the evening of Sept. 19. In a social media post that evening, police said, “One person has been confirmed deceased. There is no known threat to public safety at this time.”

Then, on Sept. 20, at about 6 a.m., Ottawa police responded to a stabbing on Baseline Road that left one person in critical condition. One man was charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon, and police say the investigation continues.

On the same day, police were called to a daytime shooting at the corner of Rideau and Dalhousie streets at about 2:15 p.m.

On the evening of Sept. 22, a man was shot and sustained non-life-threatening injuries, and the next day another man was taken to hospital with serious stab wounds in a separate incident. A spokesperson for the Ottawa paramedics said the call for the shooting in Vanier, on St-Denis Street near St-Jacques Street, came in at about 11 p.m. Sunday night, and the victim was taken to hospital in stable condition.

The following morning, a man was taken to hospital in critical condition after a stabbing in the village of Metcalfe.

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