Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would certainly agree with what Chief Bray said about the problem not being our law-abiding citizens in the disturbing trends on gangs and the data.
Here are just a few opening remarks to give you some of the statistics we're seeing, from both the Edmonton Police Service and the province. Last year we had 41 homicides. Fourteen of those homicides involved a firearm and one involved both a firearm and an edged weapon. The racial backgrounds of the 20 people responsible for these homicides were eight white, seven indigenous and five Black, so it's across the diversity of our community. Seventeen of the accused had a criminal record. In seven of the homicides, the victim and the suspect were not known to each other. In 21 of the homicides, the victim and the suspect did know each other. Twelve of the homicides were gang-related and 19 were not. In nine of the homicides that are currently under investigation, gang involvement is still unknown. Seven homicides, for sure, were related to the drug trade, which the statistics will show. For 12 of the homicides it's still not known if there was drug usage. One of the 41 homicides was domestic violence, and four were family-related violence.
In relation to the number of shootings that Edmonton had, in 2021 we had 150 shootings. In 2020 we had 158. We were down a bit last year. This year to date we've had 10.
We talk about firearms seized, which is also something we pay close attention to. In 2017 we had 1,016, and this past year we had 16,033 guns seized. You can certainly see a trend upwards in relation to that area.
In the province of Alberta, which we track, obviously, as all police services do, through our criminal intelligence service, 503 shooting events were reported, which is down 5%. The most common level of injury with shooting events was bodily injury in 35% of them, and 73% of these shooting events were believed to be targeted attacks.
In Alberta, 546 firearms were stolen and there were 114 break and enters. Obviously, a lot of these were being acquired through break and enters.
The other thing I will just highlight is that over the last year in Alberta we had 53 trafficking of firearms investigations, which was up 20%. Handguns were found to be trafficked most often, with 110 of those, followed by rifles and shotguns. There were 63 offenders identified as being either buyers or sellers of [Technical difficulty—Editor]. Seventeen potential straw purchases were identified as well.
One last thing is that we also did some research in relation to the drug patterns in the Edmonton area through our research team. We've seen a real shift. In 2007 the main drug was cocaine. You saw very little meth, opioids or heroin. It remained the trend until 2014. By far the drug we most often recognize now is meth, which as you all know is associated with some significant violence as well as being significantly attractive to our gangs. Obviously with that we've seen a real increase of opioids and increased use of heroin. Just for information's sake, it seems like cocaine is no longer very prominent in our community.
Although we continue to research this, those things are obviously closely related to some of the trends we're seeing. This shows some distinct changes from when the legalization of marijuana came into effect and those drug patterns changed. Not that it was the indicator; it just goes to show that the stronger drugs are certainly more involved than they ever were.
We obviously have lots of things to talk about in relation to things that also could be done, but I'll leave that for the questions.
I'll leave that as my opening comments. Again, thank you very much for having us all here today to discuss this very important topic.