Prince George anti-gang solutions are being paid for by the criminals, and the bill to crooks is about to get even bigger.
Crime prevention and intervention initiatives in northern B.C. are getting provincial funding from the provincial government's civil forfeiture program and Minister of Justice Shirley Bond just announced a major expansion to that endeavor. A new law is being born that would create a criminal forfeiture program as well.
Criminal forfeiture would be a court process whereby if someone was convicted of a crime, the possessions used for doing that crime and the property bought with the proceeds of that crime would be handed over to the taxpayer for resale. The civil forfeiture process would still be there to do the same thing if there was no criminal conviction but there was a strong enough likelihood that the property was crime-connected. The taxpayer will now have two hands to shake the ill-gotten money back out of criminals' pockets and put it to public use.
"I plan to make criminal forfeiture a focus during this legislative session, and I intend to forward legislative changes to see this goal realized for British Columbia," Bond told The Citizen. "The new act will give government legislative authority to manage and dispose of property forfeited as a result of a criminal prosecution from which funds may be used to compensate eligible victims as well as funding crime prevention and remediation initiatives."
The Criminal Forfeiture Office handles all the cases recommended by police for having assets to take possession of - houses, cars, boats, cash, luxury items of all kinds. The office does not direct any of the police work, but liquidates the assets once police have brought them a case that fits the program.
In northern B.C. some of the money from those liquidations has been used for:
Support for a rediscovery program in Prince Rupert that teaches Haida culture in the context of crime and violence prevention
Carrier Sekani Family Services and its Walk Tall program in Burns Lake are receiving a total of $460,000.
Prince George RCMP Community Policing is receiving over $10,000 to train local crime prevention volunteers.
Prince George RCMP Youth Academy is receiving over $5,000 to train young people from across northern B.C. about the justice system.
Last fall, the Canadian Mental Health Association in Prince George received $25,000 to address the recruitment of vulnerable adults into gangs by engaging adult offenders who live with mental illness and/or other disabilities in supported recreation and cultural education activities.
In 2008/09, the program provided $17,500 to Prince George RCMP Community Policing for a project aimed at reducing youth crime and gang violence by empowering youth with information and tools related to such key topics as drugs and gang violence and internet safety.
In 2007/08, the program provided $20,000 to Prince George Carrier Sekani Family Services to bringing urban and rural youth together for two weeks of violence prevention training and support those participants with subsequent workshops to rural and First Nations communities along Highway 16 (Highway of Tears).
The program got underway in 2006 with eight test cases that ended up generating $800,000 that year. In 2010-11 the program generated almost $5 million. By fiscal year-end in 2011-12, the program had generated nearly $10 million. More than 200 cases are still in process.
The latest innovation to the civil forfeiture program was the introduction of a streamlined process for low-value, uncontested cases, known as administrative forfeiture. That process has made it financially viable to pursue, for example, low-value vehicles and small amounts of money seized from street-level drug dealers.
If a second stream of forfeitures gets going as well - criminal forfeiture - the financial hit to crooks and public response to crime will likely increase as well.
