Violent crime, youth crime increase in 2023: Winnipeg crime report

The Winnipeg Police Service released its 2023 statistics report, which shows an increase in violent crime and youth crime in the city since 2022, despite a slight decrease in total crimes.

“We can’t arrest our way out of this problem, these crime problems need to be solved in partnership with other levels of government and community stakeholders,” said Supt. Dave Dalal, a Winnipeg Police Service Inspector.

The decrease in total crimes in 2023 was driven primarily by a reduction in property crimes, but the report shows a spike in police-reported violent crimes in 2023.

“Youth crimes continue to trend upward in 2023, increasing 23.1 percent over 2022 and 14.3 percent over the five-year average, after declining steadily for a number of years this is the second year in a row that youth crime has increased,” said Dave Bowman, a crime and intelligence analyst with the Winnipeg Police Service.

Violent youth crimes were also up 15.9 per cent year-over-year, with youth crimes involving a weapon doubling since 2021. Community advocate Sel Burrows says these numbers will keep increasing unless more programs and supports for youth are added.

“The city needs to take leadership, we need a professional rec director at every intercity community centre, the boys and girls club needs to invite into the community centre, let’s get things going and act positively to prevent crime,” said Burrows.

Executive Director for Inner City Youth Alive Kent Dueck also reacting to recent statistics.

“I find it interesting that this data point came out on the heels of project surge where we had 117 individual youth involved in 1,700 different violent acts in one year,” said Dueck.

Dueck says these stats really need to be addressed.

“Maybe we are at a point where we need to contain individuals who are causing the line share of this damage, so the community can heal and so that we can come together to do some planning and thinking forward about what we are going to do to have a safe community.”

A complete breakdown of the 2023 crime statistics can be found here.