Ottawa police chief speaks out about homicides

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Ottawa Police Service (OPS) Chief Eric Stubbs said the city is on track to reach or exceed last year’s homicide record of 25 cases.

The city has seen 10 homicides in 2025 to date, five of which happened in the past eight days.

Speaking to the Ottawa Citizen on Monday, Stubbs said he is “100 per cent confident” that all the homicides are separate incidents, but raised concerns about the uptick in violent crime over the past few months. This is the first media appearance Stubbs has made since the string of homicides in the past week.

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“At the pace that we’re on now … it puts us close or above to where we were last year, so it is concerning,” Stubbs said.

“It’s not just a guns and gangs conflict that has continued throughout the year or something along those lines where we can tell the public this is the trend we’re seeing and we as a community have to try to address it,” he said.

The police chief said the uptick in crime could be due to a growing population. About 1,017,449 people live in Ottawa, according to the 2021 Census, an increase of almost eight per cent since the 2016 Census.

The geographical size of the city also makes policing difficult, he said.

“It’s pointing out the painfully obvious. The bigger the population you have, the more issues you’re going to have, the more frequency of crime will be there — homicides, thefts, etc.,” Stubbs added.

“It’s to be expected, but obviously this is a bit of a spike that we have to try to manage.”

Stubbs noted that police are taking into consideration other factors, like relationships and gender-based violence, for some of the homicide cases reported this year. Of the 10 homicides, three of them were classified as femicides or intimate partner violence by police.

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The Ottawa Police Service defines a femicide as the killing of women and girls because of their gender, often driven by stereotyped gender roles, discrimination against women and girls, or unequal power relations between women and men.

“We take every homicide extremely seriously. It’s the most serious crime that there is, but when it is a femicide, there are certain things that investigators have to consider like what relationships are present and what the motivation of the suspect was,” he said.

“That’s really where the focus is, and it can help the investigators, but (femicides are) not taken more seriously, because (homicides) are all taken very seriously.”

Stubbs said the OPS is working with community partners to address gender-based violence and femicides throughout the city. These community partners often work with police officers to help women exit violent relationships and educate them about the resources and options available.

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“We do have a lot of partners in town, and there’s a lot of agencies that work in this industry. We rely on them greatly to help us, to guide us, to direct us in some of our work when it comes to violence against women,” he said.

“We have a lot of strong partnerships and we’ll continue to do so.”

The OPS chief said he plans to grow the homicide unit to address the uptick in violent crime.

“I know we have to grow the unit, because this pace that we’ve seen here in the last couple years can’t be sustained by that group, so we have to do more,” Stubbs said.

OPS is also relying on community policing units to address crime, he added.

“We do have community policing offices throughout the city. Some get used more than others, so it is difficult. We are so geographically spread out that it is a good idea to have different landing points around, around the city,” he said.

Anyone with information about the homicides are asked to contact the OPS’ homicide unit at 613-236-1222, extension 5493, or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

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