Statistics Canada year-over-year stats on police-reported homicides show Halifax ranked second in homicides per capita in 2011.

The report that shows there were 4.41 homicides per 100,000 people.

That was up from 11 homicides in 2010.

Mayor Mike Savage tells News 95.7 he’d like to bring back the mayor’s task force.

“We’ve talked about bringing that back to see what we’ve done wrong and what we haven’t done wrong, maybe there’s a case for it, maybe there isn’t,” he explains. “I’m open to learning more about it.”

He says he thinks police are doing a good job.

Police chief Jean-Michel Blais says police have acted on 87 per cent of the recommendations from the last round table.

“If he did choose to go this way, it would be to update the conclusions and see if anything has changed in the last five years since that report and if there’s anything else we can do,” he says.

But Blais explains murder is one of the hardest crimes to prevent.

“It’s hard to target that crime unless we get actionable intelligence that individual A is going to be shooting at individual B tonight,” says Blais.

He adds the numbers could be misleading because Halifax has a smaller population, so each murder raises the percentage per capita in a report like this higher than it would for a larger city like Toronto.

Winnipeg ranked first with 5.08 homicides per 100,000 people. Edmonton was a close third to Halifax with 4.17 deaths. Toronto ranked 14th behind cities including Saint John, Saskatoon, Gatineau, Vancouver and Victoria.

Nationally, homicides were up seven per cent.