GANG VIOLENCE TIGHTENS GRIP ON CANADA'S CITIES

Police Fear More Innocent Victims Will Be Caught In Crossfire

(CNS) - Canada's cities are in the grip of a sharp, new cycle of gang
violence fuelled by the country's growing appetite for illicit drugs
and competition among the organized crime groups that supply them,
say police and other experts.

While organized crime wars are not new to Canada, a recent wave of
gangland shootings, from Halifax to Calgary to Vancouver, has
occurred alarmingly in public places where citizens least expect
bullets to be flying. The fear and outrage that settled on Toronto in
2005 when 15-year-old Jane Creba was killed in a shootout in a
downtown shopping area has arrived in other cities, whose innocent
citizens are being hit.

"We're going through a very significant cycle, where violence has
been extremely high," says Sgt. Shinder Kirk, spokesman for British
Columbia's Integrated Gang Task Force, a multi-agency police group.

"The public nature of this violence, the callous disregard for the
safety of anyone and everyone who may be in a public spot when the
shooting occurs, is a great concern to all of us."

Why are so many gang hits taking place in public spaces?

"Public shootings are a matter of convenience," says Robert Gordon, a
criminologist and gang specialist at Simon Fraser University. "People
aren't as easy targets as in the past, so gangs will follow someone
around in public until they can make a hit. They're not concerned
with collateral damage. All they care about is hitting the target."

"Gangs have become much bolder," says Charles Momy, president of the
Canadian Police Association. "Some cities look like they're under siege."

Across the country, local politicians and provincial leaders have
responded by convening news conferences and community meetings where
citizens have expressed outrage at the shootings and the apparent
inability of police to control them.

Kash Heed, chief of the West Vancouver police, recently called
gangland violence the city's most "pressing social problem" and
admitted that what police have been doing over the past five years to
control it "isn't working."

There have been eight gangland shooting incidents in Vancouver and
its once-bucolic suburbs since New Year's Eve. Four known crime
figures, all in their 20s, have been killed and others injured.

Three of the Vancouver-area incidents occurred in busy parking lots
outside suburban malls or grocery stores. The latest episode, in the
early hours of Thursday morning, looked like a scene from a Hollywood
movie, with gang members firing wildly at each other from their
vehicles while tearing around a Chevron gas station in Langley.

No bystanders have been hit in Vancouver this year but one of the
crime figures killed in February was linked to a gangland massacre in
2007, when six people, including two bystanders, were shot to death.

In Calgary last month, four people were killed, including one
bystander, in two separate shootings. Keni Su'a, a 43-year-old
Calgarian, was shot dead while eating a meal on New Year's Day,
simply for having witnessed the execution of two gang members in the
same restaurant.

Two weeks later another gang member was killed under a hail of
bullets fired at his Dodge SUV on a Calgary street. It was the city's
fifth public gang shooting since 2007.

In Halifax last November, gang members fired multiple shots into a
suburban pizza shop, and later traded gunfire on the street outside a
children's hospital in the city's downtown.

Drive-by gang shootouts have also occurred in recent months in
Winnipeg, Prince George and on the Hobbema reserve in Alberta, where
a toddler was hit by a stray bullet.

Montreal is also no stranger to gang warfare. Dozens of organized
crime suspects, allegedly connected to the cocaine trade, were
arrested Thursday in a police sweep across Montreal and Ottawa. It
also suffered through years of biker gang turf wars.

Michael Chettleburgh, a Toronto-based criminal justice consultant and
author of the book Young Thugs, Inside the Dangerous World of
Canadian Street Gangs, says there are no real links between crime
groups in the West and the East.

Gangs in Western Canada, however, are all part of a continuous supply
chain in which B.C. marijuana, plus heroin, cocaine and guns from the
United States, are funnelled through Vancouver and into Alberta's cities.

He says money generated by the economic boom in Alberta over the past
three years not only increased the demand for drugs but lured gang
members from Eastern Canada into the province, eager for a piece of the action.

"One thing Canadians don't realize is that demand for drugs of all
descriptions has roughly doubled, right across the country, in the
last 10 years," says Chettleburgh. "So it's the drug-consuming habits
of Canadians that is contributing to the violence."

He also says the rise of chemical drugs such as ecstasy and crystal
meth -- manufactured in home labs with recipes off the Internet --
are causing some smaller, street-level gangs to leave the umbrella of
larger, organized crime groups and branch out on their own.

That friction, plus other competitive rivalries, means "the whole
industry is in flux right now, and that's why we have the kind of
violence we're seeing."

Kirk says the biggest problem in solving shootouts in public places
is that so little physical evidence is left behind, aside from shell
casings. When police question gang members injured by gunfire, they
refuse to speak.

"The piece of the puzzle that's missing are people who have knowledge
about what occurred, why, and who it was directed at," he says.

Momy says the Conservative government's new law introduced last year,
with tougher bail provisions and stiffer penalties for gang crimes,
hasn't produced the desired results.

"The new law isn't working," he says. "We're still seeing too many
cases where these guys are given bail, they're back on the street,
and they're offending all over again."