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TOP STORY
One of the more recent times someone started randomly stabbing people in Downtown Vancouver, they were out of custody in just two years.
That release just happened, actually. In January 2022, David Morin began repeatedly plunging a knife into the back of a stranger at a Vancouver Tim Hortons. Last week, the Vancouver Police announced that the “high risk to reoffend” Morin had just been set free.
So as Vancouver is beset with yet another unrelated random stabbing spree, the reaction from locals is anything but surprise. Rather, it’s being treated as the expected tithe of a system that is wholly incapable of shielding the public from unpredictable, violent criminals.
Just before noon on Wednesday, an erratic individual entered an Original Joe’s near the Vancouver Public Library, stole a knife and a bottle of liquor from behind the bar and proceeded to stab at least two random people in the surrounding neighbourhood before he was fatally shot by police inside a 7-11.
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim, for one, reacted with a stream of frustrated curse words. “Residents in Vancouver are sick of this crap,” he said. “It’s bulls–t.”
The term “stranger attack” didn’t used to be a part of the B.C. vocabulary. Its first appearance in the pages of the Vancouver Sun wasn’t until 2002, when a 22-year-old Korean student, Ji-Won Park, was attacked while jogging in Stanley Park.
But for several years now, “stranger attacks” have been almost a daily phenomenon. Sometimes it’s just a punch or a shove. Last week, for instance, saw Vancouver Police arrest a man in connection with an unprovoked sucker punch at a downtown bus stop.
Other times, like on Wednesday, it’s a mass casualty incident.
The vast majority of these stranger attacks follow a predictable pattern: The assailant is usually mentally ill, often has a lengthy criminal record and is frequently on bail or probation.
In 2022, the Vancouver Police analyzed 44 separate stranger attacks committed over a three-month period, and found that mental health was a contributing factor in 73 per cent of the cases, and that 60 per cent of suspects had previously been charged with a violent crime.
The core of the problem is two-fold. One is a mental health system that is conspicuously incapable of keeping violent mental health patients from harming the public. The other is a justice system that routinely grants bail and early release to even the most brazen repeat offenders.
The former problem was brought into stark relief in September after a similar random stabbing spree that killed 70-year-old Francis David Laporte, and left a man in his 50s without a hand. Both victims had simply been walking through the downtown core when they were suddenly and without provocation hit with a flurry of stab wounds.
Suspect Brendan McBride, 34, was described as erratic and “very troubled” upon his arrest, and it soon emerged he’d been on probation at the time of the spree, and had a lengthy history of court-ordered psychiatric care.
“I think that we have to realize that there’s too many unwell people walking around in our streets,” said Vancouver Police Chief Adam Palmer in a press conference at the time.
The non-profit Coast Mental Health was even more direct in calling the incident an indictment of the B.C. approach to mental health. “Nothing excuses what’s happened here. People want answers. They’re not easy solutions,” CEO Kier Macdonald told Postmedia.
And the year before had yielded a mass stabbing attack that was even more of a conspicuous failure of the mental health system.
After several people were randomly stabbed at the September 2023 Light Up Chinatown festival, the suspect turned out to be a man with a history of stabbing attacks who had been given a day pass from a local psychiatric hospital.
Blair Donnelly, charged with three counts of aggravated assault, had stabbed his own daughter to death in 2006, but was found not criminally responsible for the murder due to a mental disorder. And the Light Up Chinatown spree was not even the first time Donnelly had been accused of stabbing someone while on leave from a mental hospital — he’d also stabbed a friend in 2009.
At the time, B.C. Premier David Eby said he couldn’t “fathom” why Donnelly had been given a community pass. “How is that possible?” he told reporters.
But even when mental health isn’t a factor, the legal system has proved similarly willing to grant constant release to violent and unpredictable offenders.
B.C. police forces now refer to a new category of “super-prolific offenders” — generally defined as an offender with more than 30 convictions.
One of the more high-profile examples being Mohammed Majidpour, a man who already had at least 30 convictions when, in September 2022, he randomly attacked a 19-year-old woman in Downtown Vancouver with a pole, and then set fire to a car later that day.
When eventually arrested for the attack, Majidpour spent only a weekend in detention before getting bail. He’d then proceed to be arrested several more times before the pole attack even had a chance to go to trial.
In one instance, Majidpour was on bail less than three hours before he was arrested again for trying to steal $300 in leggings. As the Vancouver Police said in a statement, two officers who had arrested Majidpour the day before on a separate incident, simply followed him until he broke the law again.
“At the time of his arrest, the suspect had been out of custody for two hours, 18 minutes,” read a subsequent police statement.
IN OTHER NEWS
At about the same time that the New York Times was profiling foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly as a potential successor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Joly made a strained public appearance in Halifax that columnist Matt Gurney described as “humiliating,” and even Justin Ling, writing in the Toronto Star, said it was evidenceshe needed to be assigned to “anything other than foreign affairs.” It was at the Halifax International Security Forum, and Joly was on a panel moderated by Gary Kasparov, the former chess grandmaster turned anti-Putin dissident. In one section highlighted by Gurney, Kasparov presses Joly on why she isn’t seizing Russian assets held in Canada, and she responds with a series of false starts that ultimately ends with nervous laughter from the audience. Here’s Joly transcribed response:
“We’ve been working among the, just … we’re the first country in, within, the democracies that created this legislation that is about not only being able to, you know, sanction – sanction, of course, many companies and people – but also seize people’s assets and sell them. So, I hear you.”
It’s a semi-regular theme of this newsletter that “inclusive” policies are often directly at odds with the wishes of those ostensibly being included. In 2022, the B.C. Human Rights Commissioner recommended that school liaison officers be pulled from B.C. schools because they “contribute to a sense of criminalization and surveillance” and have a negative impact on “Indigenous, Black and other racialized students.” After a school district in Victoria actually took them up on the advice, it was met with a stern letter of protest from the region’s two largest First Nations, the Esquimalt Nation and Songhees Nation. “This abrupt decision has caused immediate and tangible harm, eroding the sense of physical and cultural safety that our students are entitled to,” they wrote.
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