Pubdate: Sun, 15 Feb 2009
Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU)
Copyright: 2009 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274
Author: Richard Foot, Canwest News Service

GANG VIOLENCE GRIPS THE LAND

(CNS) - Fear in the city.. A spate of killings across the country has 
municipal and provincial police forces scrambling to crack down on 
street gangs and organized crime

Canada's cities are in the grip of a sharp new cycle of gang 
violence, fuelled by the country's growing appetite for illicit drugs 
and competition among the organized crime groups that supply them, 
police and other experts say.

While organized crime wars are not new to Canada, an alarming wave of 
gangland shootings, from Halifax to Calgary to Vancouver, has 
occurred recently in public places where citizens least expect 
bullets to be flying.

The fear and outrage that settled on Toronto in 2005 when 15-year-old 
Jane Creba was killed in a shootout in a downtown shopping area has 
arrived in other cities, whose innocent citizens are being hit.

"We're going through a very significant cycle, where violence has 
been extremely high," said Sgt. Shinder Kirk, spokesman for British 
Columbia's Integrated Gang Task Force, a multi-agency police group.

"The public nature of this violence, the callous disregard for the 
safety of anyone and everyone who may be in a public spot when the 
shooting occurs, is a great concern to all of us." Why are so many 
gang hits taking place in public spaces? "Public shootings are a 
matter of convenience," said Robert Gordon, a criminologist and gang 
specialist at Simon Fraser University.

"People aren't as easy targets as in the past, so gangs will follow 
someone around in public until they can make a hit. They're not 
concerned with collateral damage. All they care about is hitting the 
target." "Gangs have become much bolder," said Charles Momy, 
president of the Canadian Police Association.

"Some cities look like they're under siege." Across the country, 
local politicians and provincial leaders have responded by convening 
news conferences and community meetings where citizens have expressed 
outrage at the shootings and the apparent inability of police to control them.

Kash Heed, chief of the West Vancouver Police, recently called 
gangland violence the city's most "pressing social problem" and 
admitted that what police have been doing over the past five years to 
control it "isn't working." There have been eight gangland shooting 
incidents in Vancouver and its once-bucolic suburbs since New Year's 
Eve. Four known crime figures, all in their 20s, have been killed and 
others injured.

Three of the Vancouver-area incidents occurred in busy parking lots 
outside suburban malls or grocery stores. The latest episode, in the 
wee hours of Thursday morning, looked like a scene from a Hollywood 
movie, with gang members firing wildly at each other from their 
vehicles while tearing around a gas station in Langley, B.C.

No bystanders have been hit in Vancouver this year, but one of the 
crime figures killed in February was linked to a gangland massacre in 
2007, when six people, including two bystanders, were shot to death.

Montreal is also no stranger to gang warfare. Dozens of organized 
crime suspects, allegedly connected to the cocaine trade, were 
arrested Thursday in a police sweep across Montreal and Ottawa.

Montreal has also suffered through years of biker gang turf wars, and 
innocent victims have included prison guards targeted in an attempt 
to destabilize the justice system.

In Calgary last month, four people were killed, including one 
bystander, in two separate shootings. Keni Su'a, a 43-year-old 
Calgarian, was shot dead while eating a meal on New Year's Day, 
simply for having witnessed the execution of two gang members in the 
same restaurant.

Two weeks later, another gang member was killed in a hail of bullets 
fired at his Dodge SUV on a Calgary street. It was the city's fifth 
public gang shooting since 2007.

In Halifax last November, gang members fired multiple shots into a 
suburban pizza shop, and later traded gunfire on the street outside a 
children's hospital in the city's downtown.

Drive-by gang shootouts have also occurred in recent months in 
Winnipeg, Prince George, B.C., and on the Hobbema aboriginal reserve 
in Alberta, where a 23-month-old toddler was hit by a stray bullet.

Michael Chettleburgh, a Toronto-based criminal justice consultant and 
author of the book Young Thugs, Inside the Dangerous World of 
Canadian Street Gangs, says there are no real links between crime 
groups in the West and the East.

Gangs in western Canada, however, are all part of a continuous supply 
chain in which B.C. marijuana, plus heroin, cocaine and guns from the 
United States, are funnelled through Vancouver and into Alberta's cities.

Chettleburgh says money generated by the economic boom in Alberta 
over the past three years not only increased the demand for drugs but 
lured gang members from Eastern Canada into the province, eager for a 
piece of the action.

"One thing Canadians don't realize is that demand for drugs of all 
descriptions has roughly doubled, right across the country, in the 
last 10 years," he said. "So it's the drug-consuming habits of 
Canadians that are contributing to the violence." He also says the 
rise of chemical drugs such as ecstasy and crystal meth - 
manufactured in home labs with recipes off the Internet - are causing 
some smaller, street-level gangs to leave the umbrella of larger, 
organized crime groups and branch out on their own.

That friction, plus other competitive rivalries, means "the whole 
industry is in flux right now, and that's why we have the kind of 
violence we're seeing." Kirk says the biggest problem in solving 
shootouts in public places is that so little physical evidence is 
left behind, aside from shell casings. When police question gang 
members injured by gunfire, they refuse to speak.

"The piece of the puzzle that's missing are people who have knowledge 
about what occurred, why, and who it was directed at," he said.

Momy says the Conservative government's law introduced last year, 
with tougher bail provisions and stiffer penalties for gang crimes, 
hasn't produced the desired results.

"The new law isn't working," he said.

"We're still seeing too many cases where these guys are given bail, 
they're back on the street, and they're offending all over again." 
Gordon says while prosecutors and judges should do more to push cases 
through an inefficient court system more concerned with legal process 
than with justice, disparate police agencies are also not working 
well together.

Vancouver, for example, is the last large metro area in Canada 
without a unified police force. Some of the area's police agencies do 
not even participate on the region's integrated gang or homicide task forces.

Gordon also says police across Canada have been playing catch-up with 
organized crime for years. And he worries that once the current cycle 
of violence ramps down, police and prosecutors will lose sight of the 
problem again.

"What I fear is that once the current wave is over, government 
complacency will once again set in." As for suggestions that Canada 
needs more social and education programs to reduce the root causes of 
gang violence, such as poverty, Gordon says while he agrees with a 
balanced approach, many of today's gangsters, including those 
responsible for the latest violence in Vancouver, come from 
middle-class families and good educational backgrounds.

Chettleburgh says the current cycle of violence will ramp down, once 
the gang leaders realize their warfare is ultimately bad for their 
business. Until then, he said, "Canadians need to keep their fears in check."
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