HIT CRIME GANGS IN WALLET

It's obvious why Alberta has seen such an influx of organized crime:
there's a lot of easy money to be made here in the land of disposable income.

"They follow the money," says Insp. Joe Loran, the man in charge of a new
elite group of officers from the RCMP and the Calgary and Edmonton police
services.

So it stands to reason that if you want to attack and disrupt organized
crime in every way possible, you also have to attack the financial roots of
organized crime.

The new 61-member Integrated Response to Organized Crime unit under Loran's
command will require $3.5 million in startup costs.

Next year, the province plans to spend $5.2 million on the force and $5.2
million in 2005.

That's all money well spent and there's no quibble here with the aims of
the new program or its costs.

Other than this: one should think that part of this team would include the
kinds of experts you'd need to seize the property of gang members,
including their homes, vehicles, land and bank accounts - all of which
would be turned over to taxpayers to soften the costs for even having to
have a team like this. That should mean bringing on a few accountants and
lawyers who could speed the process of seizure and disposal of the proceeds
of crime through the legal system.

The risks associated with being involved with organized crime already
include arrest and jail, plus the loss of assets deemed as proceeds from
criminal activity - not to mention the likelihood of coming to a violent end.

But if this new team is expected to increase the risk of gang members being
caught, the risk for financial loss should likewise be increased.

As well, we could probably trim the costs of fighting crime, if a
specialized legal unit was trained to find the profits of criminal activity
and take them away from the criminals.

The best part of having the IROC team in Alberta is that a provincially
dedicated police force doesn't have to worry about jurisdictional problems
within the province. It has been modelled after similar units in Toronto,
British Columbia and Quebec, including the biker enforcement unit of the
Ontario Provincial Police.

It follows logically that all of these units will eventually share
information and a national network of co-operation is an inevitable result.

A barrier to this, frankly, is the cost. So it only stands to reason that
if the taxpayers can pick up a better return on seized property than we're
getting now, we should go for it.

It's not like we've already completely tapped that aspect of crime fighting
by any means.

"Marijuana is a huge business in Alberta. It is millions and millions of
dollars," says Ian Cameron, director of the Criminal Intelligence Service
Alberta. "We direct our resources where we will get the best bang for the
buck - who is causing the most significant threat to the province?"

Just think about all the stories you've seen about the marijuana growing
operations that police are busting in the province. By no means is every
penny of ill-gotten gains being taken away from the people who build these
illegal marijuana operations. Expand that now to the huge market in the
really hard, evil drugs being pushed on out streets.

We're not talking about the young people whose alienation from society has
turned them to crime here. These are the people who end up breaking into
our homes and cars, but they merely support a much larger criminal network.

We're talking about the criminal masterminds who recruit our youth and
exploit them for billions of dollars in drug trade, prostitution,
protection scams - even stock market manipulation.

To fight these people takes policing expertise, but also legal expertise to
strip criminals of the comforts they gained from the misery of everyone else.

The battle against organized crime doesn't seem complete unless it is also
fought on the economic front.