Despite a significant drop in incidents involving guns in the first five months of 2024, Montreal police vow to remain vigilant this summer.
Despite the seven lethal events involving firearms earlier this year, Montreal police statistics show gun violence actually dropped 24 per cent in the first five months of 2024 versus the same period last year.
In a press briefing to update the gun violence situation in Montreal on Wednesday, Montreal police service spokesperson David Shane said the drop means that for the past two years, gun-related incidents in Montreal have dropped significantly, and that may be due to the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal’s recent change in strategy to focus more systematically on prevention. Compared to the first five months of 2022, which was a particularly bad year, Montreal experienced a 42 per cent drop in gun violence this year.
“Certainly we are pleased two years in a row to see a reduction,” Shane said. “We won’t take 100 per cent of the credit of course, because we work with partners and everybody does their bit, but certainly we have made some changes since 2022, the worst year in recent memory, and we have taken some decisions to reorient our operations and investigations and that certainly contributed to this reduction.”
In addition to the seven murders committed with firearms between Jan. 1 and May 31 of this year, there have been nine attempted murders and 37 incidents involving gunshots on SPVM territory. Last year over the same period, there were three murders, 14 attempted murders and 53 incidents where gunshots were fired.
In the first five months of 2024, the police force made 118 arrests for incidents involving firearms, and seized 275 guns during criminal investigations or on patrol. Yearly averages between 2019 and 2023 for gun-related incidents were: 3.6 murders, 13.8 attempted murders, and 43.4 incidents of shots fired. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of gun-related incidents dropped 26 per cent.
“A sudden rise in (gun-related) events is, unfortunately, always possible, so we have the responsibility to be vigilant by being present on the ground, and by working against gun violence upstream in a proactive and integrated way,” Shane said.
Martin Renaud, chief inspector responsible for the struggle against gun violence, suggested the reduction may be due to SPVM’s new system of “collectives” that focus on specific individuals considered to be at high risk of committing gun violence. With institutional and community partners, such as schools or youth organizations, police officers attempt to steer individuals toward other solutions to their problems, rather than gun violence.
Renaud gave two examples of the work of the collectives in the past year. From June 3 to 14, the SPVM conducted an island-wide blitz targeting individuals who were not respecting parole conditions. In that period, police arrested 56 individuals and conducted 30 searches, seizing nine firearms. Another collective intervened last spring with a 16-year-old who had publicly declared himself a member of a criminal street gang. A police officer specializing in community and social work contacted the teen and his parents, helped him to change his social circle, and find a summer job.
“Last we heard, the young man was planning to devote himself to sports and study. It is possible that his future has been positively influenced by getting away from armed violence,” Renaud said.
“This way of working upstream on gun violence, in a proactive an integrated way, is having positive results and did not exist in such a systematic way when I began my career as an investigator,” Renaud said. “Today, when we do certain arrests or searches, it is possible to be accompanied by ‘preventionists’ and to intervene with indirect victims such as parents, the little brothers and sisters of young suspects we are arresting who still live under the family roof. That allows us to help the family members who are often in shock and desperate at seeing one of their own arrested in relation to a gun violence event.”
Shane said the collectives involve investigators and other police staff meeting to discuss intelligence in order to intervene before a specific individual commits an act of revenge, for example. This was always done, he said, but not in such a formal way.
“Now it’s done more systematically. Back in the day, you had prevention measures and investigators who were able to help a person (out of a life of crime) once in a while. But with the collectives we are doing it in systematic way. So you have a very formal meeting where you have a detective lieutenant who directs the meeting and at the same table you have investigators, whether it be a narcotic investigator or a gang event investigator, a civilian employee who specializes in community work, and together they will look at the situation. What is going on in this sector? Intelligence will lead the meeting.”
Depending on whether the “at-risk” individual is young and inexperienced or more established in a criminal path, the team will decide how to intervene.