If locking up gangsters makes them merely better criminals, if education programs are not succeeding for at-risk kids, if poverty breeds desperation and anti-social behaviour, if all this conspires to produce gangs, all of it is irrelevant to the police on today's streets. Cops are chasing crooks, and in Prince George these days that is more than a full-time effort.
"Why Prince George? That is the big question," said Sgt. Raj Sidhu of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit-North. "The cause of it is, Prince George is the hub for Northern B.C. The things that accommodate business also accommodate gangs. We have infrastructure like the airport and the highways and the rail lines. We have the population."
Money and guns are symptoms of organized crime infection but Sidhu said that was the itchy surface of the issue.
"The main commodities are cocaine and marijuana, no two ways about it," he said, meaning marijuana is grown here and traded out of the community in exchange for cocaine coming into the community. Those are the star players in these trades; the money and guns are akin to additional draft picks and the player to be named later.
The public was cautioned by police to ignore most gang names they hear floating around the community. Yes, the Prince George area is dominated by the Renegades, Game Tight Soldiers, Crew (all pawns of the Hells Angels) and Independent Soldiers but at the street level, the groupings and alliances are fluid, often poorly defined, and they come and go quickly.
There are 14 members of Sidhu's anti-gang team based in Prince George. They do nothing but target the gang activity of the North. They stand alone, empowered to operate independently, but they are also empowered to partner with any law enforcement agencies anywhere in the northern half of the province: RCMP detachments, Mountie task forces, Canada Border Services, provincial regulation enforcement, Coast Guard, and so on.
"We are optimistic," said Sidhu. Indeed they have operated only about a year and have already seized scores of weapons, crates of drugs, and a long list of suspects now before the courts. "When you look at what happened with enforcement in Quebec, we know we can do our part to have an impact. There was more than 100 Hells Angels there and now they are down to about two or three, so the success has happened there."
Of course it took a well-publicized gang war that killed innocent bystanders to get public reaction to the organized crime issues of Eastern Canada, and B.C.'s public has done no better. Sidhu said there are things society needs to do to help the police in the gang push-back, and he prioritized them at the Community Solutions-Gang Crime Summit: pinpoint the kids at risk as young as possible and deliberately intervene in their lives; put mental-health and addiction supports into place; and shore up the penal system so the convictions happen better and convicts are sentenced to more productive programs and facilities.
