Cold case data shows almost 100 unsolved homicides in Calgary since 2005
Criminologist says Calgary police are doing a ‘superior job’ solving homicides, with a clearance rate of 79 per cent
Article content
Close to 100 killings in Calgary have gone unsolved between 2005 and 2021, according to data compiled by the Calgary Police Service.
At a police commission meeting Wednesday, the service presented data from an internal study on unsolved homicides from 2005 to the end of 2021. In that time frame, there were 440 homicides in the city — an average of 26 per year.
Ninety-six of those deaths, more than 21 per cent, remain unsolved. That’s a homicide clearance rate of around 79 per cent, higher than the national average of 67 per cent. The data also shows Calgary detectives solve homicides faster than the national average — 25 days compared to 36 days Canada-wide.
“What a superior job the Calgary Police Service homicide unit is doing,” said Mount Royal University criminologist Doug King. “They solve more, and they do it quicker, than they’ve been doing it in the past. They’re doing both of those things better than most, if not all, homicide units in Canada.”
Two-thirds of the unsolved killings in Calgary are associated with organized crime or drugs, police said — 50 of the 80 gang-tied killings between 2005 and 2021, and 13 of 60 drug-related homicides remain unsolved. With the statistics overlapping in some cases, shooting deaths also accounted for two-thirds of the still-open homicide cases.
“Offences like, for example, domestic homicide, or homicides where the offenders are known to the victim are more straightforward when it comes to investigating and solving,” CPS Deputy Chief Ryan Ayliffe told the commission on Wednesday. “The gang-motivated and gun homicides are the hardest for us to clear.”
Police Chief Mark Neufeld said it’s not a case of police not having suspects in many of those cases; it’s the ability of Crown prosecutors to approve charges. He said prosecutors are rightfully wary of laying charges when the evidence isn’t solid. If somebody is tried and found not guilty, they can’t be tried on the same information again.
“Some of the most spirited conversations between our investigators and the Crown are around the fact that . . . we feel like we’re there and we’ve reached the threshold, and the Crown will sometimes say, ‘Not quite, we need one other little piece,'” he said. “And those are sometimes very difficult conversations.”
Racialized homicide victims overrepresented compared to respective populations, CPS says
Statistics Canada data released last year shows homicides involving racialized victims are solved at a slower rate than others from 2019 to 2021, but CPS claims the opposite is true in Calgary. The Statistics Canada data showed that 52 per cent of homicides involving a racialized victim were solved within 100 days, compared to 68 per cent for white victims.
CPS said its claim is based on its look at 48 cases in the same timeframe — 24 white and 24 racialized. For the white victims, it says it cleared seven cases within two days, and for racialized victims, it cleared nine on the first day. Within 100 days of each killing, the cases of all but three white victims and two racialized victims had been cleared.
CPS has only been collecting race-based data on homicides since 2010 but noted that in that time, Calgary has seen a “relatively small number of missing (long-term) or murdered Indigenous victims, particularly women.”
“We’ve had two Indigenous female victims and four Indigenous male victims among our unsolved homicides,” said Ayliffe.
However, the force does cite an overrepresentation of racialized victims compared to their respective populations. Data shows that since 2010, 42 per cent of Calgary’s homicide victims are white, despite that group representing 60 per cent of the city’s population.
Indigenous people — four per cent of the population — represent 13 per cent of homicide victims, and other visible minorities account for 36 per cent of the city’s population but 44 per cent of its murder victims.
“Indigenous persons and persons of racialized minority backgrounds are overrepresented through virtually every step of the criminal justice system,” said King. “Walk into the remand centre and you’ll see that overrepresentation of non-Caucasian individuals all around you . . . it’s the stuff of great debate and great studies, but it’s a long-standing reality.”
Calgary has lower homicide rate than Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton
King also pointed to Statistics Canada data on homicide rates, which slots Calgary as the lowest among Western Canada’s big cities at 1.41 per 100,000 people in 2021. The Ottawa-Gatineau area is the only Canadian metro area with a population close to or over a million that has a lower homicide rate — with the Ontario side at 1.34 per 100,000 and the Quebec side at 0.87 in 2021.
“Edmonton’s homicide rate is about three times higher than Calgary, Vancouver’s is higher, Winnipeg’s is higher,” he said. “So Calgary is safer in relation to homicides than virtually any large metropolitan city in Canada. Our homicides are lower, and our police solve more of them more quickly, which is — I mean, that’s the gold star right there.”
CPS plans to stretch its unsolved homicide data back further and is also working on expanding race-based data. It said it will take a more “trauma-informed” approach to murder investigations, including in its correspondence with affected families.
“We did recognize there were gaps in our contact with families — not with nefarious intent,” said Ayliffe. “It’s just that in some of these cases, particularly the ones that go over a decade, we’ve had investigators that retired, we have families who, at the beginning of an investigation, might be more hostile or not in a place where they feel like they can connect with the police . . . we recognized that we had to invent this in a part of our service that would allow us not have this sort of slip.”
The service also plans to change the name of its cold case team to the “historical unsolved homicide team” as part of those trauma-informed endeavours.
Twitter: @michaelrdrguez
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.