LUCRATIVE MARKET BORN FROM ABBY GANG INSTABILITY

Resurgent Duhre group seizing opporunity

Arrests of high-ranking members in the United Nations gang and the Red
Scorpions has left a power vacuum in Abbotsford that other organized
crime organizations are exploiting, police are saying.

Drug warrants executed by the Abbotsford Police Department in late
September and early October netted more than $80,000 in drugs and cash
and four individuals with ties to the Duhre group, a gang APD Const.
Ian MacDonald described as "resurgent," and that did not have vested
interests in the community in previous years.

Investigators had been gathering intelligence on the group's
operations in Abbotsford for more than 12 months, MacDonald said,
adding that anyone reading a newspaper would know Abbotsford was ripe
for muscling in on.

"I think they seized an opportunity," MacDonald said.

"Pretty much everyone in the Lower Mainland knows about the arrests of
the hierarchy, predominantly of the Red Scorpions and the UN Gang, so
if you're a competing interest . . . you would go 'I think there might
be some weakness out there'."

Sgt. Shinder Kirk, spokesman for the Combined Forces Special
Enforcement Unit, said most street-level drug dealers and foot
soldiers are more interested in getting paid, as opposed to which gang
is supplying their product.

"It's always been tenuous - loyalty," Kirk said.

"Gangs, that we're seeing at the street level, they will change
allegiances depending on a variety of factors."

MacDonald echoed some of Kirk's sentiments, and said gang members want
job security too.

"To get somebody to flip their affiliation isn't a lot of work . . .
Some cash or some muscle might be enough to gain some territory, or
gain a drug line here and there," he said.

Regardless of who is running drug lines in Abbotsford, MacDonald said
the big picture for the department is to address getting rid of the
demand for illegal narcotics.

"People need to know that the money they are spending on drugs is
going into organized crime. This is the way gangs work, and there is a
societal cost to bear," MacDonald said.

"The side effects of those decisions in dollars can end up being
violence, it can end up being with your kids becoming involved in
those groups."

Kirk said gangs can move to predominance based on who is being
arrested and taken out of the picture.

"If you have significant enforcement efforts against a particular
crime type, or crime group, that leaves a bit of a vacuum. And that
vacuum can lead to instability in the sense that now you have
competing interests all over again within a community," Kirk said.
Instability and competing interests manifest in many ways, from a
contract killing or violent assault to control of the drug supply,
Kirk said, with the more powerful gangs pushing into rural
communities.

Despite a significant drop in homicides in Abbotsford in 2010 - five
so far this year compared to 10 in 2009 - MacDonald said the
department still has its work cut out for it, as Lower Mainland gangs
move through communities.

"Imagine a group of organisms in a Petri dish," MacDonald
said.

"They move and flow, one [gang] will consume another, but it's not as
a result of the other shrinking away, it's like a constant dance
amongst them."