CITY MURDERS FAR FROM RANDOM

Blue-Collar City With Plenty of Drugs a Recipe for Violence

EDMONTON - Depending on your method of statistical analysis, there
have been either eight or 11 homicides since New Year's Day. Both
numbers are high, so high that we've managed to put aside our faintly
ridiculous arguments about snow-clearing and to suspend
arguments-to-come about pot holes to wonder why so many people have
been murdered in the last two months.

Each year Maclean's magazine publishes a rather unfortunate list of
the most dangerous cities in Canada. Since the beginning of the last
economic boom, Edmonton has figured near the top every year
- -especially in homicides.

"Edmonton has an economy that, unfortunately, contributes to
violence," said one of the most respected homicide detectives on the
city police force, Dan Jones, this week. "We're a blue-collar city
with blue-collar problems, a port city in the middle of the prairies,
with a lot of drugs."

That said, only one of the homicides has been "random," and it was the
result of a fist fight outside a nightclub. The others have been
committed by an offender known to the victim or were lifestyle-based
- -that is, drug or gang related.

"We don't have a Boston strangler or a Zodiac Killer," said Jones.
"Almost no random murders. If you're outside a drug or gang lifestyle,
and you aren't in an abusive relationship, you're just fine in Edmonton."

Still, murder is murder. Even when we use terms of ironic endearment
like Stabmonton or Deadmonton, we're expressing a spiritual malaise.
We choose to feel it, if we feel it at all, as a reputation management
issue. We remind each other it usually happens in one of those
neighbourhoods or one of those communities.

The most fascinating and controversial story in the 2005 bestseller
Freakonomics was about the startling drop in the New York City crime
rate in the 1990s. Authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner found the
drop had little to do with any "tough on crime" initiatives and
everything to do with the legalization of abortion in 1973 -that is,
fewer "unwanted young men" 20 years later.

We long for these sorts of insights, as they tend to simplify a
hopelessly complex problem. At the end of my conversation with Jones
this week, we hit upon a local candidate.

"I'd much rather deal with a kid high on marijuana than a kid high on
cocaine," he said, noting carefully that both were, of course, illegal.

By the time the last boom came around, the large oilsands operations
and refineries had begun instituting random testing for marijuana. The
drug stays in your system for threeto-six weeks, so the young men
inclined to smoke marijuana off the job site were obliged to stop.

Cocaine, however, the key ingredient in crack and one of the most
devastating and profitable street drugs, is untraceable in the blood
stream after approximately 36 hours.

"Guys who might have smoked marijuana off-shift started smoking rock,"
said Jones.

Levitt and Dubner had concluded, in the same study on crime and
abortion, that the single most important objective factor in the
doubling of homicide rates in black American neighbourhoods between
1984 and 1994 was the introduction and spread of crack cocaine.

Legalized abortion was about women's rights. Random marijuana testing
was designed to minimize accidents and maximize productivity. These
unintended causes and effects obscure the truth: drug use, gang
membership, abusive relationships and homicide are all side-effects of
despair.

"As a spiritual response I always ask, 'How do we find the face of God
in the people who are affected by murder, and in the people who commit
it?' " said Doris Kieser, a theology professor at St. Joseph's College
and a psychologist who has worked with inner-city youth.

"Every kid in every school knows where to find the gang," she said.
"When we're dealing with children, we have to remember every child has
dignity. How do we nurture that?"

One of her suggestions was to ensure all kids have access to sports
and other extracurricular activities, even if their parents can't -for
whatever reason -manage it.

David Goa, director of the Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of
Religion and Public Life at the Augustana Campus of the University of
Alberta, has worked with some of the communities whose children have
been caught up in many of the recent homicides.

"This is our problem, not theirs," he said, in an Old Strathcona cafe
not far from the site of one of last summer's homicides. "It has to do
with how we can create a hospitable society that can actually welcome
people who come out of difficult circumstances -whatever those
circumstances may be."

Goa talked about creating public space for particular cultures so that
young men isolated from whatever they left behind have a meaningful
place to go.

The cultural draw of what Detective Jones calls lifestyle choices,
drugs and gangsterism is enormously appealing to young people who feel
a lack of connection with Edmonton.

It's not only people in those neighbourhoods and those communities
- -new immigrants, urban aboriginals -even if they feel the stresses of
it most acutely. This sense of meaninglessness, of living in a busy,
rich Canadian nowhere, is what wealthy middle-class students on the
bus are expressing when they trade nicknames for the city: Edmurder.
Murderton. Eville.

"The only antidote for meaninglessness is the development of the
capacity to care, to see each other's faces," said Goa, though he
doesn't mean the Heritage Festival and he isn't referring to any form
of civic glee club.

So what does he mean?

We don't have a coherent culture in Canada, unlike countries with the
lowest murder rates in the developed world -Iceland and Japan. But
eating the same food and pronouncing words identically shouldn't be a
prerequisite for caring, for engaging with what Goa calls the "civic
sphere" of a liberal democratic society more creatively.

"When I visit these young people in prison I always say the same
thing," said Goa. "We need you! We want you and need you to engage
with this city, this culture. You have something worthwhile we need."

Goa didn't say so, but it was clear he was searching for a way to
goad, encourage and include these young men before they landed in prison.