Downtown safety an elusive goal

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/03/2025 (246 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last Saturday, a 30-year-old woman was walking in the 800 block of Rosser Avenue, in the heart of downtown Brandon, when she was accosted and assaulted by three teenage girls, who began punching her. They pushed her to the ground and, along with a male teen, kicked and punched her while she lay wounded and defenceless.

They then took the victim’s cellphone and left her, not knowing — and apparently not caring — if she would survive the attack.

A Brandon Police Service media report says she was rushed to the hospital with “significant non life-threatening injuries. It adds that “Police continued to search for the suspects and were able to apprehend all four suspects over the next couple of hours,” and that “two 14-year-old females, a 17-year-old female and a 15-year-old male were all arrested and charged with robbery with violence.”

This latest assault is far from unique. It is just the latest of dozens of violent incidents that have occurred in the downtown area over the past several years. In January, an elderly man and woman were accosted on the sidewalk on the south side of Rosser Avenue, about two blocks away from where last Saturday’s assault occurred. They were approached by a younger man who hit the older man in the head with a baseball bat. The attack was entirely unprovoked.

The alleged attacker in that case was arrested shortly after the assault happened, and has been charged with assault with a weapon. He has a lengthy criminal record for violent crimes and, just one day before the assault on Rosser Avenue, had been convicted in Winnipeg of other assaults.

There are those who complain that such attacks are rare in the downtown area, and that media reports exaggerate the seriousness of the issue. They argue that putting the spotlight on downtown crime is making the problem worse and hampering downtown revitalization efforts.

The reality is, however, that more than one-third of all calls that Brandon police officers respond to each year are in response to incidents in the core. That fact is reflected in BPS media reports, which detail multiple violent incidents and/or property crimes in the downtown every week.

Far from exaggerating the number and/or severity of such incidents, the likelihood is that many more incidents go unreported by both the victims and the media.

There are also those who argue that the teens and adults who are committing these crimes are, in many cases, themselves victims of crime and deserving of empathy and compassion; that they “need to live somewhere” and cannot be blamed for the hard lives they have lived.

Those advocates also point out that the downtown area has become a social services delivery hub over the past 20 years, with the full knowledge, consent and encouragement of all three levels of government. Given that reality, they say it should be no surprise that users of those services would be downtown.

Caught in the middle are area residents, downtown business owners and their staff, and those who travel downtown for various purposes. Many of them are victims of crime in the area. They just want to live their lives and conduct their business without concern for their safety; without fearing they will be swarmed and beaten or stabbed by a gang of angry attackers.

Beyond that, the problems in the downtown area are causing the values of residential and business properties to fall. That hurts the city’s assessment base and shifts the tax burden to other areas of the city.

We agree with BPS Chief Tyler Bates, who told the Sun this week that “we have to have a city where people feel safe to be downtown, and right now, I think there’s a lot of concern with respect to a few incidents of late, and rightly so.”

We share his hope that a new downtown safety strategy will “make sure that our downtown is as safe as it possibly can be,” but we also note that planned consultations with business owners, social service organizations and community organizations toward the formation of that plan do not appear to include area residents. If that is the case, it’s a mistake. Downtown homeowners have made a huge investment in the area and have an obvious stake in its safety and security.

Visitors to Brandon, and in particular those considering moving here, judge the safety and attractiveness of the city based upon their perception of our downtown. And, right now, it’s a problem that is hurting our city’s future and long-term viability.

The stakes are high. Here’s hoping this latest effort to make our downtown area safer will be more successful than past plans.