All the key speakers at the Community Solutions-Gang Crime Summit had no illusions about the depth of danger the community is in. Gangs have a hold here that puts common citizens at risk, not just the gangsters fighting amongst themselves.
"Quite frankly, you have a problem," said police Sgt. Shinder Kirk, spokesman for the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit that takes on B.C.'s gangs. "It is becoming entrenched. Once it becomes fully entrenched, you have a significant issue and I live that in Abbotsford," where the open violence and murders of the drug trade are the stuff of sometimes daily headlines.
It was consensus among the symposium's speakers that Prince George was in the same boat.
"You are staring at a crisis. You absolutely are," said gang expert Mark Totten, another of the keynote speakers at Monday's forum. "Do you have the political will? Locking up the bad guys is needed, but you need to do more than that. If your only prong is policing and corrections, you are doomed. You need early intervention. We know largely who the gang kids are going to be by the time they are six years of age. How can we share power and resources? If you can't, you are not going to move anywhere on this."
When the issue of the Mclean's Magazine crime rankings came up - a cover article last week in the national news magazine that put Prince George at the top of the violent crime statistics - the hundreds gathered to hear the featured speakers didn't spend any energy on arguing the point.
Mayor Dan Rogers said this issue has festered in Prince George since the early 1990s when The Renegades Motorcycle Club set up a clubhouse in the city as the kingpin organized crime group, a directly connected puppet club of the Lower Mainland Hells Angels. It has only ballooned since then.
He remembered being a councillor when city officials tried to focus bylaw services on those early outlaws and they retorted by sending a lawyer who lamented that the bylaws weren't being applied evenly because they had been to all the mayor and councillors' homes to ensure they had all the regulations in place.
The not-so-thinly veiled message from the gang was: we know where you live.
"With young children, it made me step back when that signal was given," said Rogers. "But you must say no, I will not be intimidated, I will not stop doing what's right, out of fear."
RCMP Supt. Brenda Butterworth-Carr, commander of the city's detachment, said police had seen some major successes in the past year, even the past two years, but it wasn't a problem the police could combat by themselves.
"We have young people being actually recruited," by street gangs, she said. "How can we respond to that as a community and provide alternatives?"
She stressed the need for tangibles to emerge from this summit, not just talk.
