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Photo by Greg Southam/Postmedia

A particularly surreal effect is that the city’s police continue to issue public appeals for information on murders while providing only the vaguest details of the crime.

This week, for instance, Edmonton police reported that a 25-year-old male had been fatally shot in the city’s southwest. However, they did not provide his name or any details about him. Police also withheld the exact location of the shooting, noting only the nearest intersection.

“Investigators encourage anyone with information about this suspicious death to contact the EPS,” the statement concluded.

The Alberta RCMP have also begun to be much more reticent about releasing the names of people murdered in the province’s smaller communities. Four Albertans killed in March, 2017, for example, were never identified by the Mounties.

Although no police force has embraced a no-names policy quite as strongly as Edmonton, scattered examples exist across the country. In 2015, for instance, Peel Regional Police withheld the name of a 22-year-old man beaten to death with an air hose at his job.

Police will even withhold the identities of people they’ve shot themselves. Earlier this month, a man was shot to death by police during an attempted arrest at a Nanaimo, B.C. ferry terminal. To date, the public does not know who he was because the B.C. RCMP refuse to release his name, age or even why he was in Nanaimo.

Police maintain that “no naming” policies are simply following the law. The Regina police’s plan to no longer release the names of homicide is informed by new privacy laws that came into effect in Saskatchewan on Jan. 1. In Alberta, police cite the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which they say only gives them permission to release personal information “for the purpose for which the information was collected.”