Gang Violence Rattles 2010 Olympic City

Gang violence rattles 2010 Olympic city

AFP, Feb 22, 2009

VANCOUVER, Canada (AFP) — Gang violence is rattling residents of this Western Canadian metropolis as the city makes final preparations for the February 2010 winter Olympics, say officials.

The federal public safety minister dubbed Vancouver "Canada's gang capital" this month after hitmen shot dead a young mother driving a car while her four-year-old son screamed in the back seat.

Headlines, such as a recent story in the national Globe and Mail newspaper, "Another brazen shooting in Canada's gang capital," appear almost daily.

In February alone there have been two shoot-outs outside busy supermarkets and numerous shootings on local streets. On Friday a man died after mysteriously falling from the balcony of the apartment home of another man whom police have linked to gangs.

Police call most of the killings "targeted" but several victims have been innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time, including a family man gunned down in 2007 in his truck -- which police said was the same model as one driven by a local gangster.

There have also been several kidnappings. On Friday police freed an 18-year-old Chinese student whose kidnappers demanded a ransom payment from his family in China. Police said five people had been arrested in the case.

The violence has led to a flood of fearful or angry comments on public talk shows and Internet forums, and demands for action ahead of the Winter Olympic Games in one year.

"Canada's record of repeat criminal offenses is amongst the worst in the world," said Darcy Rezac of the Vancouver Board of Trade in a news release calling for harsher sentences for repeat offenders. "This situation is out of control in Canada, and at a crisis level in Vancouver."

Next week, federal and provincial officials will meet in Ottawa, Canada's capital, about gang violence.

Police and crime experts link most of the violence to illegal drugs, which fuel an underground economy in Greater Vancouver, Canada's third-largest metropolis with a population of about 2.2 million people.

The marijuana trade alone is worth billions of dollars to British Columbia's economy, "between 1.5 and 4.6 percent of the province's gross domestic product," economist Stephen Easton said in a paper for the Fraser Institute.

Because gang connections are sometimes murky, precise statistics for organized crime victims are unknown. But criminologist Robert Gordon of Simon Fraser University pointed to causes for growing concern.

"Gaps between outbursts of violence are getting shorter," he said.

"Any time you have people shooting each other in public in a brazen manner it's real, and serious," he said.

If authorities "don't do something we could see more and more bodies piling up on the streets."

Gordon said in a report for a provincial agency the government has three possible responses: to mount a "war on organized crime," treat drug prevention and abuse more aggressively as a health issue, including by legalizing marijuana, or combining the two approaches with drug regulation and a campaign against organized crime.

Local mayors meanwhile are asking for more provincial prosecutors. Their other demands include changing federal criminal law to deny bail when the charges are gun-related, and cracking down on gun smuggling across the border from the United States into Canada, where most guns are illegal.