(LifeSiteNews) — Police warn that an unprecedented number of Canadian officers have been murdered in the last seven months.
On May 11, Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Eric Mueller was shot to death and two officers sustained non-life-threatening injuries in what police are calling an ambush, making Mueller the ninth Canadian officer to be murdered since fall 2022.
“It’s as if there is an actual attack on the policing community,” Matthew Cox, president of the Ottawa Police Association, told The Epoch Times. “We have never seen this before in Canada.”
According to Cox, the surge in murderous violence has caused officers to be scared to go to work. He attributed the rise in part to a loss of respect for police among Canadians.
“I think that the government needs to get itself involved and start toughening up on the crime bills,” Cox urged.
The eight other fallen officers include two women.
On March 27, a suspect in Louiseville, Quebec, stabbed Sûreté du Québec (SQ) Sgt. Maureen Breau to death. The 42-year-old was a mother of two.
On March 16, Edmonton Constables Travis Jordan, 35, and Brett Ryan, 30, who was expecting his first child, answered a call concerning a family dispute only to be shot and killed. Their 16-year-old murderer later shot and killed himself.
On December 27, 28-year-old Ontario Provincial Police Constable Grzegorz Pierzchala suffered fatal injuries when he responded to a call concerning a vehicle in a ditch.
On October 18, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Shaelyn Yang, 31, was fatally stabbed in Burnaby, British Columbia, while serving an eviction notice to a man who lived in a tent in a local park.
On October 11, a 22-year-old man shot and killed South Simcoe Police Service constables Devon Northrup, 33, and Morgan Russell, 54, when the men responded to a disturbance call from a home in Innisfil, Ontario.
According to Ontario’s police watchdog, the suspect “waited in ambush” for the officers. They did not have time to draw their guns before being shot. The suspect later died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
On September 12, Constable Andrew Hong, 48, was ambushed and shot to death at a Tim Horton’s in Mississauga, Ontario, as he picked up coffee for his colleagues during his break.
According to investigators, the suspect shot three others, two of whom died, before being killed by the police.
As president of the Ottawa Police Association, Cox recommends that more police officers be hired to adequately respond to calls with appropriate resources. Cox attributes a possible factor of the increased violence to the availability illegally trafficked guns from the United States.
Rick Parent, a retired associate professor of criminology and police studies at Simon Fraser University and a 30-year veteran of the Delta, British Columbia police force, revealed that the spike in police murders is an increasing problem in Canada.
Parent’s research reveals that 56 police officers have been murdered on duty in Canada since 1990. The deaths averaged one or two per year, with an occasional zero or three. 2005 saw an uptick as five officers were murdered. Similarly, three officers died in in 2006 and four in 2007. 2022 was the second year with five officer murders, and 2023 has already seen three deaths in two incidents.
According to Parent, resources who could be spent looking into the murder of police officers are often instead focused on examining police misconduct.
“We only focus on misconduct, and that’s where we have let ourselves down,” Parent said. “That’s the disappointing part, that we just kind of let it go on the way it is. … Once police knock on the door, the odds of them being murdered is high.”