More police won’t stop B.C. gangs: experts experts, police, factors, family, needed

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More police won’t stop B.C. gangs: experts
Prevention strategies, community involvement also needed to dissuade youth from joining

VANCOUVER - The traditional risk factors for joining gangs — poverty, family dysfunction, a sense of alienation and lack of social supports — don’t appear to hold true for Vancouver gangs, a gang-prevention researcher says.

As anti-gang experts work to head off retaliatory attacks for Sunday’s gang shooting in Kelowna that killed Red Scorpion Jonathan Bacon and wounded Hells Angel Larry Amero and three others, researcher Gira Bhatt is looking at ways to prevent kids from joining gangs in the first place.

Bhatt, a psychology professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, says the gang demographics in B.C. are unique.

“[For example,] if you look at the Bacon brothers, they come from a good family — a rich family — where the parents are very supportive of their kids,” Bhatt said.

“We can’t borrow solutions from Toronto or Los Angeles and apply them here.”

MLA Kash Heed, former solicitor-general and former West Vancouver police chief, agrees.

“We haven’t seen that typical American profile of a gangster here in B.C.,” Heed said in an interview. “I said that years ago, when I was leading some of the gang task force in Vancouver. We had people who were highly educated, who were affluent, who were raised very well, who were still attracted to this type of lifestyle.”

Meanwhile, police still aren’t saying if gunfire that erupted on the streets of Surrey Monday night had anything to do with the fatal mass shooting in broad daylight Sunday afternoon in front of the Delta Grand Okanagan Resort.

“We’ll be looking at whether there is a connection to what happened in Kelowna,” RCMP Sgt. Peter Thiessen said. “We’re aware that people sense that a gang war is erupting.”

In the Monday shooting, a single attacker believed to be on foot shot at a 32-year-old man as many as eight times as he got into a car, but the man escaped with minor injuries from bursting glass, Thiessen said.

“Based on [the target’s] background, it seems there is a level of gang affiliation,” he said.

Heed said retaliation is inevitable after Sunday’s shooting.

“You don’t take out the elder of the Bacons, you don’t injure a full-patch Hells Angel member and you don’t severely injure the niece of a president of a Hells Angel chapter and expect no retaliation,” Heed said.

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To halt that cycle of violence, police need help from families, schools and the community as a whole, both Bhatt and Heed said.

“Police are asking for more resources, and yes, they need more resources. But if that’s all we do, the need for more and more police will simply grow over time,” Bhatt said.

Heed called for a “comprehensive strategy” to combat gangs, including a universal anti-bullying program in schools, early-intervention programs for families and meaningful opportunities for kids to get involved in their community.

“You are not going to arrest your way out of this gang situation that we have,” Heed said. “We’re just reacting to the problem. We’ve reacted to this problem since 1994 here in Vancouver. We still have this absolutely astounding display of public violence on our streets.”

Bhatt is project director for Acting Together, a federally funded research project aimed at preventing youth from joining gangs, based at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

The project has studied 403 Grade 8 students in Surrey and works closely with the Surrey school district’s Wrap Around Program, a one-on-one program that works with at-risk kids.

People working in the program have observed that only children, only sons and oldest sons are the most likely to get into trouble, Bhatt said.

“Essentially, these are these spoiled kids who have a sense of entitlement,” Bhatt said.

Although the first results of Bhatt’s five-year study won’t be released until October, she suggests early results show that kids with a sense of gratitude, altruism and of self-identity are less likely to follow a path of violence.

Bhatt cited a video about gangs made by Surrey high-school students working with Shaw TV and the Acting Together Program that will appear this weekend on Shaw TV as one example of how to meaningfully engage kids.

Meanwhile, Kelowna RCMP investigating this weekend’s fatal shooting are asking anyone with information about a newer, silver/green Ford Explorer seen in Kelowna this past weekend to call them.

Calling it “a vehicle of interest,” police said anyone with any information — where it was, which way it was going, its occupants — should call the Kelowna Detachment at 250-762-3300 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-5477.

Police also said the Kelowna investigation is moving forward with “numerous leads” and that the status of the people injured in the shooting is unchanged.

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More police won’t stop B.C. gangs, experts say.



Jonathan Bacon (left) walks out of court on June 6, 2008 after the judge threw out gun and drug charges against him. He was accompanied by Matt Johnston (right), who is now facing charges in the Surrey Six case. The 2008 case is now under appeal.