Rash of shootings in Edmonton part of North American trend, not gang related: EPS

Edmonton police held a media update on Wednesday to discuss a rash of recent shootings in the city.

Officers have responded to 10 shootings since Aug. 28, eight of which involved serious or life-threatening injuries.

Police say all the shootings were targeted and they’re still investigating if they are linked.

“These are individuals that consciously take a firearm out with them, day or night, and they’re out targeting individuals and shooting at individuals,” said Staff Sgt. Eric Stewart. “We say targeted, none of these are accidental.”

Investigators say they haven’t determined a motive for the shootings, but that this isn’t gang activity. Instead, it speaks to a larger trend seen across Canada and North America.

“There’s more people carrying edged weapons, bear spray, firearms, and when people are carrying those and somebody crosses them, whatever it is, there’s opportunity,” said Acting Deputy Chief Shane Perka.

“A lot of times these are impulsive reactions to someone who is angry at another person, so they resort to what they have on their person.”

“To say all of these are confined to drug or gang activity I think would be erroneous.”

Stewart says the Edmonton Police Service has responded to 105 shootings so far this year. Fifty-three per cent of those shootings resulted in injuries, and 65 per cent had the potential to injure innocent bystanders.

“What’s concerning to us is these individuals aren’t thinking when they pull that trigger what’s beyond their target and what they’re looking at doing,” Stewart said. “Because those rounds fly over the city and they’re hitting homes, cars, and innocent people sometimes.”

As of Aug. 31, EPS had also seized 452 firearms.

VIOLENT CRIMES UP, NON-VIOLENT CRIMES DOWN

Temitope Oriola, a professor of criminology at the University of Alberta and the president elect of the Canadian Sociological Association, agrees with the police assessment that violent crimes are up across North America.

“Those shootings speak to very broad patterns of crime, well established in the criminological literature, but they also create a concern, continuing concerns as regards the rise in the violent crime severity index,” he told CTV News Edmonton on Tuesday. “In other words, the seriousness or egregiousness of violent crimes in Canada is in fact growing.”

According to Statistics Canada, while violent crime is on the rise, non-violent crimes are actually decreasing.

Oriola says one solution is taking guns off the street and he wants to see an illegal firearms buyback.

“There are far too many firearms in the hands of unauthorized individuals. They make the work of our police officers far more difficult than it should be, because their own lives are at stake as well,” he said. “And of course for the average citizen, many of them have no weapons of any kind, who are just out to a restaurant to have dinner with their family or their friends, it shakes the very core of the foundations of such persons.”

Police say it will take more help from the public to close the investigations.

“We can say we know for the most part for every file who are suspects are in these files, it doesn’t mean we get to a charge right away. These are very complex investigations,” Stewart said.

“We want to be able to have people come forward, tell us what’s going on in their communities, tell us if they see something, so we can then react and deal with it accordingly.” 

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Nahreman Issa.