WAR ON STREET GANGS SHOULD BE A PRIORITY

What is holding up the long-promised and much-delayed Quebec plan to
deal with Montreal's escalating street-gang crime? After Montreal
police chief Yvan Delorme said he'd "had it up to here" with waiting,
and after Claude Dauphin, the Montreal executive committee's
public-security man, backed him up, the Parti Quebecois and Action
democratique du Quebec made it unanimous by also insisting loudly last
week that Quebec finally produce the blueprint to eradicate that
particular plague.

Premier Jean Charest keeps saying the project will be ready by
Christmas. We hope so, and we wonder why it has taken so long.

At an international conference on street gangs held last week in
Montreal - itself an eloquent indication of our growing problem - Los
Angeles police chief Gary Brennan had an important message for us. LA,
he said, has long been chasing the problem after the fact, dealing
with each murder as it happens. Canada's problem is not yet nearly as
well developed, he added, and so we still have an opportunity to get
ahead of the curve with preventive measures.

Not many problems are more urgent to police than gang crime. When
dedicated thugs go at it, there's generally a lot of blood spilled,
and worse, it's often the blood of very unlucky innocent bystanders.
Daniel Desrochers, 11, became the tragic example of that "collateral
damage" in the Hells Angels bikers' war in 1995. After his death,
Montreal-area police forces finally buckled down and mounted an
operation that eventually put many top bikers in jail.

The tactics will have to be different against street gangs, but an
equally tight focus on this problem, too, could also serve to deal
with the more prosaic - and often more brutal - 50 or so street gangs
now infesting neighbourhoods in and around Montreal.

After many months of waiting, Dauphin and Delorme are asking that
Ottawa and Quebec stop dithering and pony up the $40 million over
three years necessary to fight these bandits - and assign at least one
single, solitary crown prosecutor devoted full-time to work along with
police investigators in their inquiries (Toronto has 60).

That's not a lot of money for such an important task - stopping the
violent hoodlums who now, we're told, recruit in schools.

Dauphin and Delorme sensibly point to Toronto, which responded quickly
and well after 15-year-old Jane Creba was gunned down by a street gang
at midday in downtown Toronto two years ago during Christmas season.
Queen's Park immediately earmarked $26 million and pooled 116
investigators for a task force to deal with the problem.

Montreal had more gang murders in January and February of this year
than in all of last year (14 vs. 12), and one crime-fighter said gangs
are now moving to Quebec's hinterland and Indian reserves. We'll have
to fight them there, too.

All the more reason to stop waiting and finally produce the plan.