Manitoba’s government announced March 20 that it will spend $2.1 million to establish a provincewide integrated missing persons response team, headed up by the Winnipeg Police Service’s missing persons co-ordinators.
More than 9,300 people were reported missing in Winnipeg alone in 2022 and Manitoba RCMP receives about 10 missing persons reports across the province every day — more than 3,500 a year — with 53 per cent of those being reported to northern detachments, said Asst. Comm. Rob Hill, Manitoba RCMP commanding officer.
The reasons people are reported missing vary, said Manitoba Justice Minister Kelvin Goertzen, though he noted that a high percentage — 63 per cent of all missing persons in 2021 — are runaway female youth.
“Many are young people in the CFS system,” he said. “Others are runaways from northern First Nations communities and they remain on the street and vulnerable to violence, to exploitation, and abuse.”
Some missing women and girls travel to Winnipeg or other urban centres or are lured there or trafficked there and find themselves at high risk of being exploited, said Families Minister Rochelle Squires.
Winnipeg Police Chief Danny Smyth said the two biggest sources of missing persons reports in the city are youth runaways from group homes and also people who have moved to Winnipeg for education or employment or travelled there for health care or even just visited for fun.
“They’re not used to the dangers and harms that can come with the city and they become vulnerable,” he said.
The integrated response team will facilitate better sharing of information between city police services in Winnipeg and Brandon and RCMP detachments throughout the rest of the province.
“By having that co-ordinated response it allows us to share information quickly,” Smyth said.
Heidi Spence, director of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okmakanak’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls liaison unit said better communication between police and the families and loved ones of missing people is important.
“I’m really happy to hear about this initiative,” she said. “I look forward to working with everyone and seeing how we can better work with each other and be able to share information quickly to families so we can try to help them when their loved one goes missing.”
As recently as 2019, Thompson alone had more than 2,000 missing persons reports filed with RCMP annually. Over the past few years, that number has declined to about 1,500 per year, and was trending even lower for 2022. A big factor in the decline was the re-establishment of the StreetReach North team a little over three years ago. By establishing relationships with children and youth at risk of going missing or being exploited, including teens in CFS care living in group homes in Thompson, the team manages to determine the whereabouts of many AWOL group home residents before police get involved.
