Pubdate: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 Source: Abbotsford Times (CN BC) Copyright: 2009 The Abbotsford Times Contact: http://www.abbotsfordtimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1009 Author: Cam Tucker AIMING TO THWART GANG LIFESTYLE An estimated crowd of more than 200 people focused on gang violence and how to prevent it at a forum Sunday afternoon in the Gurdwara Baba Banda Singh Bahadar Sikh Society temple. For two hours, the crowd was presented three ways in which to help prevent gang violence in the Lower Mainland from various speakers in law enforcement and criminology professors from the University of the Fraser Valley. The list of speakers included Supt. Dan Malo, the officer in charge of the B.C. Integrated Gang Task Force, who spoke to the crowd for 45 minutes about the gang "lifestyle" and its appeal for young people. "As a community, what we have to concentrate on is in fact that lifestyle," said Malo, who took time from his summer vacation to talk to the crowd. "That is why we go to work everyday. The people in the gang task force are not going to target the organized crime people . . . we spend our time with the local police departments and we deal with the people that are at the gang lifestyle level. "The people who are taking over territory, that deal drug lines, that run dial-a-dope operations." According to Promising Practices for Addressing Youth Involvement in Gangs, a report published in 2008, the average age for youth to begin to associate with gangs is 13 and for every 100,000 youth in Canada, 26 are involved in gang activity at some level. Malo said that for youth, there is a certain status symbol that comes with being involved in gang activity. "That's the area in the community where it's now cool to wear a bulletproof vest. . . Now the reason you wear a bulletproof vest is you get to walk out onto the street and say to all of your friends 'look how important I am. I'm so important that someone actually wants to kill me.'" Malo focused on three points that the B.C. gang task force and RCMP and municipal police detachments are using to help youth steer clear of gang activity. The first point, Malo said, was prevention. According to him, local police detachments are now working in schools with young students, acting as mentors, to help deter youth from the attractions of gangs. Dr. Darryl Plecas, director of the Centre for Criminal Justice Research at the University of the Fraser Valley, agreed that parents must try to keep kids away from negative influences. "It's not enough to just say 'I'm keeping you away from the groups of bad apples,'" said Plecas. "What we, as families, communities and schools, have to be doing is providing viable and meaningful alternatives." The second solution is intervention, according to Malo. Since 2008, the City of Surrey has been involved in Project Wrap. Since September, Project Wrap has identified more than 100 youth as potential gang members. The third type of defence against gang activity is enforcement, said Malo. "That group of people that has decided they are above you needs to be dealt with and they need to be dealt with harshly," Malo said of alleged Red Scorpions gang member Jamie Bacon of Abbotsford and U.N. gang founder Clayton Roueche, who are both behind bars. Statistics Canada recently reported Abbotsford and Mission had the most homicides per capita in Canada for 2008, with 4.7 homicides for every 100,000 people. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard R Smith Jr