AIMING TO THWART GANG LIFESTYLE

An estimated crowd of more than 200 people focused on gang violence
and how to prevent it at a forum Sunday afternoon in the Gurdwara Baba
Banda Singh Bahadar Sikh Society temple.

For two hours, the crowd was presented three ways in which to help
prevent gang violence in the Lower Mainland from various speakers in
law enforcement and criminology professors from the University of the
Fraser Valley.

The list of speakers included Supt. Dan Malo, the officer in charge of
the B.C. Integrated Gang Task Force, who spoke to the crowd for 45
minutes about the gang "lifestyle" and its appeal for young people.

"As a community, what we have to concentrate on is in fact that
lifestyle," said Malo, who took time from his summer vacation to talk
to the crowd.

"That is why we go to work everyday. The people in the gang task force
are not going to target the organized crime people . . . we spend our
time with the local police departments and we deal with the people
that are at the gang lifestyle level.

"The people who are taking over territory, that deal drug lines, that
run dial-a-dope operations."

According to Promising Practices for Addressing Youth Involvement in
Gangs, a report published in 2008, the average age for youth to begin
to associate with gangs is 13 and for every 100,000 youth in Canada,
26 are involved in gang activity at some level.

Malo said that for youth, there is a certain status symbol that comes
with being involved in gang activity.

"That's the area in the community where it's now cool to wear a
bulletproof vest. . . Now the reason you wear a bulletproof vest is
you get to walk out onto the street and say to all of your friends
'look how important I am. I'm so important that someone actually wants
to kill me.'"

Malo focused on three points that the B.C. gang task force and RCMP
and municipal police detachments are using to help youth steer clear
of gang activity.

The first point, Malo said, was prevention. According to him, local
police detachments are now working in schools with young students,
acting as mentors, to help deter youth from the attractions of gangs.

Dr. Darryl Plecas, director of the Centre for Criminal Justice
Research at the University of the Fraser Valley, agreed that parents
must try to keep kids away from negative influences.

"It's not enough to just say 'I'm keeping you away from the groups of
bad apples,'" said Plecas.

"What we, as families, communities and schools, have to be doing is
providing viable and meaningful alternatives."

The second solution is intervention, according to Malo. Since 2008,
the City of Surrey has been involved in Project Wrap.

Since September, Project Wrap has identified more than 100 youth as
potential gang members.

The third type of defence against gang activity is enforcement, said
Malo.

"That group of people that has decided they are above you needs to be
dealt with and they need to be dealt with harshly," Malo said of
alleged Red Scorpions gang member Jamie Bacon of Abbotsford and U.N.
gang founder Clayton Roueche, who are both behind bars.

Statistics Canada recently reported Abbotsford and Mission had the
most homicides per capita in Canada for 2008, with 4.7 homicides for
every 100,000 people.