GANG VIOLENCE GRIPS THE LAND

(CNS) - Fear in the city.. A spate of killings across the country has
municipal and provincial police forces scrambling to crack down on
street gangs and organized crime

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,
police and other experts say.

While organized crime wars are not new to Canada, an alarming wave of
gangland shootings, from Halifax to Calgary to Vancouver, has
occurred recently 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," said 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," said 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," said 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
wee 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 gas station in Langley, B.C.

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.

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.

Montreal has also suffered through years of biker gang turf wars, and
innocent victims have included prison guards targeted in an attempt
to destabilize the justice system.

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 in 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, B.C., and on the Hobbema aboriginal reserve
in Alberta, where a 23-month-old toddler was hit by a stray bullet.

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.

Chettleburgh 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," he said. "So it's the drug-consuming habits of
Canadians that are 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 said.

Momy says the Conservative government's 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 said.

"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."
Gordon says while prosecutors and judges should do more to push cases
through an inefficient court system more concerned with legal process
than with justice, disparate police agencies are also not working
well together.

Vancouver, for example, is the last large metro area in Canada
without a unified police force. Some of the area's police agencies do
not even participate on the region's integrated gang or homicide task forces.

Gordon also says police across Canada have been playing catch-up with
organized crime for years. And he worries that once the current cycle
of violence ramps down, police and prosecutors will lose sight of the
problem again.

"What I fear is that once the current wave is over, government
complacency will once again set in." As for suggestions that Canada
needs more social and education programs to reduce the root causes of
gang violence, such as poverty, Gordon says while he agrees with a
balanced approach, many of today's gangsters, including those
responsible for the latest violence in Vancouver, come from
middle-class families and good educational backgrounds.

Chettleburgh says the current cycle of violence will ramp down, once
the gang leaders realize their warfare is ultimately bad for their
business. Until then, he said, "Canadians need to keep their fears in check."