Following inquiries by the Citizen, the provincial RCMP has confirmed the Cariboo's special pot buster squad will continue, and expand. The one-year pilot project in the Prince George region will now become provincial.
RCMP Supt. Brian Cantera, commander of the E-Division Drug Enforcement Branch, said the successes of the Cariboo Region Integrated Marijuana Enforcement (CRIME) Task Force were so strong they dare not let up, and in fact have to look beyond the Cariboo.
"It is going to basically change from its current form. We are looking at having regional teams formed," he said.
"We do have to deploy resources to other parts of B.C., too. It is a fairly significant problem and honestly all regions have a very serious issue with this. I don't know if the public understands just how serious this is, in terms of how it funds organized crime."
Gangs in B.C. are not led by uneducated youths clad in black, riding on little bikes, carting guns and drugs around in backpacks late at night. That is just one element of street-level organized crime.
The criminals at the top of this chain are highly sophisticated, well-connected and ruthless but seemingly upstanding business professionals.
Research has shown B.C.'s gangs to be the richest in the world, classing them equal to or higher than the Mafia or Asian Triade criminal groups in terms of cash, resources and propensity for murder and assault.
They are also responsible - through money laundering fronts, extortion, political influence and unfair financing - for diseasing the B.C. legitimate economy. Law-abiding business owners are inflicted with financial losses and harder work than even they realize, all because gangs have massive, secret fortunes at their disposal.
Those fortunes are made primarily by growing marijuana in large-scale clandestine plantations (some outdoors, some in greenhouses, some inside buildings). These are not the personal use pot gardens some Canadians feel entitled to, even if they are over the legal line. These are multi-million-dollar crop sites all to resource B.C.'s gangs. Cantera said the money they reap is vast and easy, and the marijuana is also traded with other gangs outside of B.C. for illegal weapons and other varieties of drugs (cocaine, heroin, etc.) to sell on our streets.
"I strongly believe that the majority of Canadians looks forward to us getting tough on marijuana grow-ops," said Cantera. "We left somewhat of a legacy piece to continue on there in the Cariboo, and my hope is to see that done in other parts of B.C."
According to Cantera, the details have not been finalized, but early modelling looks like an ongoing federal grow-op team will be smaller in the future, but will not be stand-alone. It will likely join forces with the regional drug squad based at North District Headquarters or the organized crime team based at the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit complex.
In the meantime, there is no taking the police foot of the grow-op gas. The CRIME Task Force has had its current mandate renewed until January, meaning the full Cariboo team is going to keep working as is until the province-wide fan-out is ready.
"I am not naive. We have not taken care of the problem completely," Cantera said. "But we did significantly disrupt organized crime in the Cariboo region and we went a long way to improve community safety in that region. We have to use those lessons we learned to fight organized crime in other areas as well, and we have to keep up our work against organized crime in the Cariboo."
