Al Russell has been doing business from his downtown Prince George store for seven years and he’s never seen vagrancy, property crime and violent people causing problems like he has lately.
The owner of Buckhorn Heating & Air Conditioning/Carrier Plumbing & Heating on Second Avenue east of Queensway was reminded of that last week when a man smashed 10 windows of his shop in a late-night spree of vandalism that hit three other neighbouring businesses.
“It’s gotten 100 times worse in the last four or five years. When I first started you didn’t have people camped on Second Avenue,” said Russell. “Their numbers are increasing, we’ve never had this many homeless on our street and they’re mean.
“The street people we had before were courteous and nice,” he said. “They were down and out but they weren’t creeps or violent people. My daughter used to volunteer at St. Vincent de Paul and now I wouldn’t let her, it’s scary. They’re mean and you take your life in your hands when you go into a group of them. It’s been getting like this since the Greyhound bus stopped.”
Greyhound shut down its bus service in Western Canada in October 2018 and until that point inmates were given bus tickets to their homes in other parts of B.C. or other provinces upon their release from custody at Prince George Correctional Centre. Now they get taxi rides downtown.
“If you don’t have money in your bank account or someone to pick you up then you are stuck in Prince George,” said Prince George RCMP Cpl. Jennifer Cooper.
Russell says the jail in Prince George is the source of many of the undesirable people who frequent downtown and are causing problems for shop owners and their customers with their open drug use, and street loitering and their willingness to commit property crimes and threaten acts of violence.
“Some people thought it was the fires (in 2017 and 2018) that brought them in, but those people could go home again after the evacuation and maybe a few stayed in Prince George but not to the extent we’re seeing, and it seems to be getting worse,” said Russell.
Russell wants the courts to quit letting habitual criminals back on the street after they’ve been arrested and give them jail time when they break laws to remind them there are repercussions for what they do.
“They’ve got to stop treating them like babies, they’re adults who make choices that aren’t good,” he said. “Either they follow the rules like everybody else or they get put away. It seems like nobody’s listening.”
