Arts, Faculty of
Geography, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Osterberg, Erin C
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Gang violence in the Lower Mainland is the focus of much media, political, policy, and police attention, but a lack of Canadian studies on police and policy responses hinders an evidence-based approach to prevention and control. In light of the gaps in the Canadian knowledge base, this research is an effort to contribute to the understanding of gangs in British Columbia (BC). The empirical data is derived from semi-structured qualitative interviews with 42 police officers and two civilian employees across three jurisdictions: Surrey, Abbotsford, and Delta. These interviews sought to assemble police perceptions and understanding of Lower Mainland gangs with respect to their organization, structure, and the nature of their activities. This examination includes an overview of dial-a-doping as an important characteristic of gangs in BC, perceptions of the implications of ethnicity, and the ways in which what have been termed non-traditional risk factors for gangs present themselves in the BC context. From the interviews, this research describes the policy instruments deployed by police across the three jurisdictions in gang prevention, intervention, and suppression efforts. Given the lack of available empirical data on the efficacy of these efforts, the findings will analyze the efficacy of these responses to suggest ‘what has worked’ as perceived by the police officers tasked with program implementation, and consider police perceptions of the structural, capacity, and resource challenges that may limit the success of police-based policies, strategies, and programs aimed at preventing and controlling gang violence. Finally, a way forward is suggested noting that the response to gang violence in BC requires engagement beyond the police, acknowledging the need to reduce the demand for supply of illicit narcotics, and the need to limit the capacity for predatory wealth accumulation that the police interviewed in this research suggested is the primary motivator for gang participation in BC’s Lower Mainland. This call to address the larger social problems related to mental health and substance abuse, thereby reducing the demand for supply, is in keeping with the longstanding position reiterated by police organizations across the Lower Mainland: “We can’t arrest our way out of this”.
“WE CAN’T ARREST OUR WAY OUT OF THIS” POLICE RESPONSES TO GANG VIOLENCE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA’S LOWER MAINLAND by Erin C. Osterberg B.A. Simon Fraser University, 2003 M.A. University of the Fraser Valley, 2011 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Geography) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) July 2020 ©Erin C. Osterberg 2020 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: “We can’t arrest our way out of this” police responses to gang violence in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland Examining Committee: Daniel Hiebert, Geography, University of British Columbia Supervisor David Ley, Geography, University of British Columbia Supervisory Committee Member Sara K. Thompson, Criminology, Ryerson University Supervisory Committee Member Merje Kuus, Geography, University of British Columbia University Examiner Marvin Westwood, Education, University of British Columbia University Examiner submitted by Erin C. Osterberg in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography iii Abstract Gang violence in the Lower Mainland is the focus of much media, political, policy, and police attention, but a lack of Canadian studies on police and policy responses hinders an evidence-based approach to prevention and control. In light of the gaps in the Canadian knowledge base, this research is an effort to contribute to the understanding of gangs in British Columbia (BC). The empirical data is derived from semi-structured qualitative interviews with 42 police officers and two civilian employees across three jurisdictions: Surrey, Abbotsford, and Delta. These interviews sought to assemble police perceptions and understanding of Lower Mainland gangs with respect to their organization, structure, and the nature of their activities. This examination includes an overview of dial-a-doping as an important characteristic of gangs in BC, perceptions of the implications of ethnicity, and the ways in which what have been termed non-traditional risk factors for gangs present themselves in the BC context. From the interviews, this research describes the policy instruments deployed by police across the three jurisdictions in gang prevention, intervention, and suppression efforts. Given the lack of available empirical data on the efficacy of these efforts, the findings will analyze the efficacy of these responses to suggest ‘what has worked’ as perceived by the police officers tasked with program implementation, and consider police perceptions of the structural, capacity, and resource challenges that may limit the success of police-based policies, strategies, and programs aimed at preventing and controlling gang violence. Finally, a way forward is suggested noting that the response to gang violence in BC requires engagement beyond the police, acknowledging the need to reduce the demand for supply of illicit narcotics, and the need to limit the capacity for predatory wealth accumulation that the police interviewed in this research suggested is the primary motivator for gang participation in BC’s Lower Mainland. This call to address the larger social problems related to mental health and substance abuse, thereby reducing the demand for supply, is in keeping with the longstanding position reiterated by police organizations across the Lower Mainland: “We can’t arrest our way out of this”. iv Lay Summary This research seeks to assemble the extensive literature about gangs generally, in Canada and BC specifically, and police efforts in prevention, intervention, and suppression programming. The empirical contribution offers police perceptions from interviews with 42 officers and two civilians across three jurisdictions. Participant responses consider the implications of ethnicity and race, the ways in which what have been termed non-traditional risk factors for gangs present in the BC context, and provides an overview of dial-a-doping. This research offers an overview of police responses to gang violence, asking ‘what worked’ and examining the barriers that challenge police efforts and successes. Finally, a way forward is suggested noting that the response to gangs requires broader civic and community engagement to address mental health concerns and reduce the demand for supply of illicit narcotics to limit the capacity for predatory wealth accumulation that have been a hallmark of gangs in BC. v Preface This dissertation is an original, unpublished intellectual product of the author, Erin C. Osterberg. The fieldwork reported in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 was covered by UBC Behavioral Research Ethics Board (BREB) Certificate Number H16-02371. vi Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................. iv Preface ....................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ...................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ............................................................................................................. ix List of Figures .............................................................................................................. i Glossary ...................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. xii Dedication ............................................................................................................... xiii Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 About this Study: Objectives and Research Questions ............................................. 4 Chapter 1. Gang Violence as a Policy Problem ........................................................... 12 Gang Related Homicide in Canada ......................................................................... 13 Gang Violence – a Policy Issue in British Columbia ................................................. 15 Policing in British Columbia ................................................................................... 26 Patchwork Quilt – Police Jurisdictions in the Lower Mainland ................................ 28 Surrey ........................................................................................................................ 32 Abbotsford ................................................................................................................ 33 Delta .......................................................................................................................... 35 Context: The Role of Migration ............................................................................. 39 South Asian Diaspora ................................................................................................ 40 South Asian Identity in British Columbia .................................................................. 42 History of South Asian Gangs in BC ........................................................................ 46 Research and Responses ........................................................................................... 53 The Violence Persists ................................................................................................ 57 A Path Forward ......................................................................................................... 59 Chapter 2. Defining Gangs ........................................................................................ 62 Ground Zero - Chicago........................................................................................... 62 Scholarly Efforts to Define Gangs .......................................................................... 62 Theoretical Debates .............................................................................................. 64 The Eurogang Definition ........................................................................................... 65 A Canadian Definition ........................................................................................... 65 The Gang Continuum ................................................................................................ 66 Problem Definition – Police Defining Gangs ........................................................... 68 Setting the Agenda ............................................................................................... 71 The Need for an Evidence Base ............................................................................. 72 Chapter 3. Research on Gangs and Responses to Gang Members ............................... 79 The American Experience ......................................................................................... 80 A Chronological Examination of Scholarly Research on BC Gangs ........................... 84 Overview of Gang Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression Programs ................ 94 Literature on Primary Prevention Programs........................................................... 97 School Liaison Officers ............................................................................................ 100 vii School Presentations - Is G.R.E.A.T. Great? ............................................................ 105 The Potential for Iatrogenic Effects in the Literature ............................................. 107 Community Engagement Forums ........................................................................... 109 Community Safety Partnerships ............................................................................. 111 Surveillance Cameras .............................................................................................. 114 Anti-Gang Media Campaigns .................................................................................. 114 In Sum: Promising Practices in Primary Prevention................................................ 115 Literature on Secondary Intervention Strategies .................................................. 116 Existing Gang Intervention Programs in Canada .................................................... 117 Desistance and Exiting ............................................................................................ 119 Sports Programs ...................................................................................................... 120 Wraparound ............................................................................................................ 121 In Sum - Promising Practices in Secondary Intervention ........................................ 122 Literature on Gang Suppression Strategies .......................................................... 122 Displacement .......................................................................................................... 126 In Sum - Promising Practice in Suppression Strategies ........................................... 128 Chapter 4. Methodology ......................................................................................... 131 Positionality and Reflexivity .................................................................................... 132 Conflict of Interest .................................................................................................. 134 Policy Analysis? Or Not…......................................................................................... 136 The Interviews ......................................................................................................... 137 Research Questions ............................................................................................ 137 Access and Recruitment.......................................................................................... 139 Ethical Concerns ...................................................................................................... 142 Data Collection: Semi-Structured Interviews ......................................................... 143 Participant Information........................................................................................... 145 Data Preparation ..................................................................................................... 149 Data Analysis and Qualitative Rigor ........................................................................ 150 Document Analysis.................................................................................................. 154 Chapter 5. The Setting: Gangs in BC ........................................................................ 156 Dial-A-Doping in BC ............................................................................................. 156 CDSA ........................................................................................................................ 158 Police as Policy Actors – Perspective Matters ........................................................ 165 Police Perceptions of the Organization, Structure, and Hierarchy of Gangs in BC 166 Police Perceptions of the Role of Ethnicity ............................................................. 174 Police Perceptions of Non-Traditional Risk Factors ................................................ 177 Chapter 6. Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression Programs ............................. 189 Policing Gangs through Primary Prevention Programs ......................................... 189 School Liaison Officers ............................................................................................ 191 School Talks ............................................................................................................. 193 Community Engagement/Forums & Media: ........................................................... 197 Surveillance Cameras .............................................................................................. 200 Anti-Gang Media Campaigns .................................................................................. 203 Policing Gangs through Secondary Intervention Programs ................................... 207 viii Double Duty: Police Officers as Youth Workers ..................................................... 208 Youth Counselling ................................................................................................... 209 Sports Programs ...................................................................................................... 211 Wraparound ............................................................................................................ 212 Surrey WRAP ........................................................................................................... 212 Abbotsford Wraparound Programming .................................................................. 214 Desistance & Exiting ................................................................................................ 215 Christmas Cards ...................................................................................................... 215 Policing Gangs through Tertiary Suppression Strategies ....................................... 224 Uniformed Gang Enforcement ................................................................................ 225 The Outlier: Delta’s Unique ‘No Call Too Small’ Philosophy:.................................. 227 Curfew Checks ......................................................................................................... 229 Displacement .......................................................................................................... 231 Barwatch ................................................................................................................. 232 Hitting the Pocketbook - Civil Forfeiture ................................................................ 234 Perceived Efficacy ............................................................................................... 238 ‘We Can’t Arrest Our Way Out of This’ ................................................................... 240 Chapter 7. Structural, Capacity, and Resource Challenges ........................................ 245 Policy Creation and Implementation ...................................................................... 245 Structural Challenges to Effective Police Responses ............................................. 249 Silos ......................................................................................................................... 249 Reactive Policing ..................................................................................................... 251 Capacity & Resource-Related Challenges ............................................................. 253 Mental Health & Addictions ................................................................................... 253 International Smuggling of Illicit Narcotics into BC ................................................ 258 Police as Policymakers ............................................................................................ 261 A Way Forward ................................................................................................... 264 Violence as a Public Health Issue ......................................................................... 265 Policing and Public Health – Not an Oxymoron ...................................................... 267 The Jigsaw Puzzle: Police Responses and the Public Health Model ....................... 269 Community-Based Prevention Models ................................................................ 272 Crime Prevention through Social Development ..................................................... 272 The Spergel Model .................................................................................................. 274 The ‘Pulling Levers’ Approach – Boston Ceasefire.................................................. 277 Cure Violence – Public Health Model ................................................................... 280 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 284 Limitations and Future Research ......................................................................... 285 References .............................................................................................................. 287 Appendices: ............................................................................................................ 327 Appendix A – Information Poster & Consent Forms ............................................. 327 Appendix B – Semi-Structured Interview Guide ................................................... 330 ix List of Tables Table 1. Police Resources in Each Research Jurisdiction, 2017 .................................................... 27 Table 2. Police Organizations in the Lower Mainland. Author’s Own. ......................................... 29 Table 3. Economic Data by Jurisdiction from 2016 Census .......................................................... 31 Table 4. Mother Tongue languages (English + Top 5) spoken in Surrey, Census 2016. ............... 32 Table 5. Mother Tongue languages spoken (English + Top 5) in Abbotsford, Census 2016 ........ 34 Table 6. Mother Tongue languages spoken (English + Top 5) in Delta, Census 2016 .................. 35 Table 7. Confirmed & Suspected Gang Related Homicides and Attempts 2008-2018. CFSEU Data. ................................................................................................................................... 38 Table 8. Top 3 Visible Minority Populations in each city, by numbers. Census 2016 .................. 47 Table 9. Population Statistics, 2016 Census ................................................................................. 47 Table 10. Participant Information ............................................................................................... 149 Table 11. NVIVO Coding Table of Nodes, Respondents Assigned, and Coded Passages. Author’s Own. ............................................................................................................................. 152 Table 12. Prevention Strategies by Jurisdiction. Author’s Own. ................................................ 206 Table 13. Intervention Strategies by Jurisdiction. Author’s Own. .............................................. 223 Table 14. Suppression Strategies by Jurisdiction. Author’s Own. .............................................. 238 List of Figures Figure 1. Castle Fun Park in Abbotsford, BC. Author’s Own Image. ............................................... 1 Figure 2. My residence on Harvest Drive, Bacon Residence on Strathcona Court. Google Maps. . 3 Figure 3. Homicide in Canada/Number Confirmed as Gang Related, 2005-2018 (Juristat, 2016). ............................................................................................................................. 14 Figure 4. Gang-related Homicides, Canada and British Columbia, 1999 to 2016 rate per 100,000 population. ....................................................................................................... 17 Figure 5. Homicide in British Columbia /Number Identified as Gang Related, 2005-2018. ......... 18 Figure 6. Illicit Drug Toxicity Deaths and Death Rate per 100,000 Population. Source: BC Coroners Service .......................................................................................................... 22 Figure 7. Awareness Posters Available for Public Download at www.knowyoursource.ca. ......... 24 Figure 8. Map of Metro Vancouver in the RCMP’s Lower Mainland District; RCMP in Purple. BC RCMP. ....................................................................................................................................... 30 Figure 9. Police Reported Theft of Auto (6 months 12/24/2018-06/24/2019). ............................ 37 Figure 10. Ethnicity of Victims of Gang Related Victims of Homicide & Attempts in BC 2006-18 (CFSEU Data). ................................................................................................................................ 51 Figure 11. Ethnicity of victims of gang-related homicide attempts by jurisdiction 2006-2018 (CFSEU Data). ................................................................................................................................ 52 Figure 12. Ethnicity of victims of gang-related homicides by jurisdictions 2006-2018 (CFSEU Data). ................................................................................................................................ 53 Figure 13. Wortley's Gang Continuum, Adapted by Author. ........................................................ 68 Figure 14. Diagram of a Typical Dial-a-dope Operation in BC. CFSEU (2015c) ........................... 157 Figure 15. Events that May Have Contributed/Resulted in Destabilized Power 2009-2013 Author’s Own. ............................................................................................................................. 173 Figure 16. APD Warning Indicating Presence of Surveillance Cameras. Author’s Own Image... 202 ii Figure 17. Abbotsford Police Department’s Anti-Gang Campaign. Reprinted with Express Permission. ............................................................................................ 203 Figure 18. The CFSEU BC’s End Gang Life Posters. Reprinted with express permission.............. 205 Figure 19. The CFSEU-BC’s End Gang Life Sticker on a Police Vehicle. Author’s Own Image. .... 206 Figure 20. Abbotsford Police Department’s 2012 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. ......... 217 Figure 21. Abbotsford Police Department's 2013 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. ......... 218 Figure 22. Abbotsford Police Department's 2014 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. ......... 219 Figure 23. Abbotsford Police Department’s 2015 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. ......... 220 Figure 24. Abbotsford Police Department’s 2016 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. ......... 221 Figure 25. Abbotsford Police Department's 2017 & Final Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. .................................................................................................................. 222 Glossary APD .............................. Abbotsford Police Department BC ................................ British Columbia BCCDC .......................... British Columbia Centre for Disease Control BK ................................ Brothers Keepers CBC .............................. Canada Broadcasting Corporation CBSA ............................ Canada Border Service Agency CCC .............................. Criminal Code of Canada CDSA ............................ Controlled Drugs and Substances Act CFSEU .......................... Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit CMHA .......................... Canadian Mental Health Association DPD .............................. Delta Police Department FVRD ............................ Fraser Valley Regional District GVRD ........................... Greater Vancouver Regional District HA ................................ Hells Angels IGTF ............................. Integrated Gang Task Force IHIT .............................. Integrated Homicide Investigation Team IS .................................. Independent Soldiers LMD ............................. Lower Mainland OCABC ......................... Organized Crime Agency of British Columbia OIC ............................... Officer in Charge PHO ............................. Provincial Health Officer in British Columbia PRIME .......................... Police Records Information Management Environment PVGO ........................... Priority Violent Gang Offender PPT............................... Possession for the Purpose of Trafficking – 5(1) CDSA RCMP ........................... Royal Canadian Mounted Police RS ................................. Red Scorpions SGET ............................ Surrey Gang Enforcement Team SLO .............................. School Liaison Officer SNA .............................. Social Network Analysis UGET ............................ Uniformed Gang Enforcement Team (from CFSEU) VPD .............................. Vancouver Police Department xii Acknowledgements This research project was possible because of the willingness of the Abbotsford Police Department, Delta Police Department, and Surrey RCMP to allow me access to wander around asking a lot of questions. Thank-you enormously for your support. To the police officers and civilian members so willing to engage, generously sharing your perspective and experiences, you are at the centre of it all, thank-you. I have received generous financial support for this and other research from the UBC Faculty of Graduate Studies, the Canadian Research Network on Terrorism, Security, and Society, my former employer CBSA through the DRAP, as well as my current employer, the University of the Fraser Valley in both tuition support and research releases. Thank-you. To the childhood teachers that inspire a love of learning, you make a difference every single day. This journey through post-secondary started in 1998 at Douglas College when Colin Campbell saw in me something I had yet to see in myself. I am also deeply grateful for the support of Darryl Plecas and Terry Waterhouse, it was during my M.A. that I came to realize that the journey should not end there. Irwin Cohen, you have been a sounding board, offered a keen eye for detail, become an amazing mentor, and a good friend. Thank-you to all of you for your mentorship, advice, and numerous letters of reference. Your unwavering support has taken me to places I never imagined, and will never be forgotten. To Elanna, Jenny, Bronwyn, Shambhavi, and Sarah, this experience was enriched by every moment spent with you. Your wisdom, kindness, and generosity are unforgettable. To (all of) my parents, my numerous siblings, my amazing husband, our amazing friends, our enormous village, and our incredible, smart, kind, funny, and loving children; you believed I could, even when I wasn’t so sure. My heart is full. Finally, this could not have been possible without my supervisor Dan Hiebert, and committee members Sara Thompson and David Ley. Thank-you for your support, the generosity of your time, and the extensive feedback that improved not only my writing, but my critical perspective, and comprehensive understanding. Carpe Diem. xiii Dedication To My Children, It is your unwavering support that has allowed me to complete this journey. I love you more. Together, you are my sunshine. In loving you, I have learned that anything is possible. To My Husband, Thank-you for making everything possible. To Our Village, This remained possible because of your love, support, persistent encouragement, and frequently delivered sustenance. To My Colleagues - Old and New, Every day I am thankful for our friendship and laughter. To Tomato, You’ve left pawprints in my soul. I came to this place from an unlikely start. The power of learning is that knowledge remains yours forever, it can never be taken away. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. -Barack Obama SHE believed SHE could, so SHE did. You can too. 1 Introduction The playful and rapidly moving colored lights of the rooftop shone brightly in the dark night sky. It was early December 2006 and the sun had set early in the evening, well before dinnertime. The music was loud yet drowned out by the constant cacophony of the hundreds of pay-per-play amusement games that lined the room. Nostalgic favorites including mini-bowling, air hockey, Pacman, and whac-a-mole line the enormous play space filled with smiling children and their families. Parents laughed alongside their children in the batting cages, at the shooting gallery, and throughout the two indoor mini-golf courses. Friday nights have always busy at Castle Fun Park, a popular indoor amusement park in Abbotsford, British Columbia (BC). However, this Friday night was different. South of the main entrance doors is a large dining area with the kind of motorized musical animals once made popular by Disney. Imagine the Tiki Show, but with forest animals rather than birds. A young family with two school-aged children entered through the large main entrance doors into the somewhat overwhelming chaos and were visibly surprised by the large group of well-built twenty-something year old men gathered there. This was no ordinary night. The men looked tense. The father, a family man, looked just a little afraid. Before long, the conspicuous men were surrounded by police officers in full ERT gear, supplemented by a substantial cadre of uniformed officers. Onerous black uniforms, seemingly huge assault rifles, and a coordinated takedown resulted with gangsters Figure 1. Castle Fun Park in Abbotsford, BC. Author’s Own Image. 2 lying out prone on the floor amid flashing amusement games.1 The police takedown resulted in arrests and the peaceful seizure of several handguns. Handguns in an amusement park full of children. A number of men were arrested at Castle Fun Park that December night in 2006, including one who would soon become notorious in the Lower Mainland gang scene: Jamie Bacon. It is now May 2020 and James Kyle Bacon has been incarcerated at Surrey pre-trial center since April of 2009. He has been incarcerated for 11 years, but he has yet to be convicted of any crime. In December 2017, Jamie Bacon’s charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder were stayed. Those charged stemmed from the most egregious homicides in BC’s history, known as the ‘Surrey Six’ murders. In May 2019, Jamie Bacon went to trial on charges of counselling to commit murder. After a lengthy criminal trial, the jury was hung, and a mistrial was declared. Crown prosecutors indicated they intended to move forward with a re-trial. Jamie Bacon’s re-trial by jury began on March 3, 2020, and was expected to last three months. On March 17, the trial was adjourned as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Court proceedings will not resume until the state of emergency has been lifted (Bolan, 2020). Perhaps some thought that Jamie Bacon’s pre-trial incarceration would bring peace. Instead, the pace of gang violence remains intense, and the stakes continue to rise. For those living in the Lower Mainland, the gang conflict remains at the forefront of individual safety concerns. I know this because it is my lived experience. As a long-time resident of the Fraser Valley raising two young kids here, gang violence is a very real concern. From 2001-2007, I lived 1.4km from the Bacon residence, where police surveillance cameras were overtly and directly pointed at their home, and a police vehicle sat out front 24/7. This police response was, in part, in response to an incident in 2005, when Jamie Bacon’s older brother Jonathan was shot 11 times on the driveway out front of their home on Strathcona Court. After this incident, the Bacons had a bulletproof front door installed. Jonathan Bacon survived that attempt on his life, only to be murdered in August of 2011 while sitting in a white Porsche out front of the Delta Grand Okanagan Hotel. 1 Video of this police takedown was released to CBC and aired in a television documentary by David Brady Productions called ‘Gangster Next Door’. The video can be viewed at: https://vimeo.com/20494843 3 Figure 2 below depicts the proximity of my home to the Bacon residence, as well as its proximity to Prince Charles Elementary School, where lockdown procedures were initiated several times as a result of gun violence. Figure 2. My residence on Harvest Drive, Bacon Residence on Strathcona Court. Google Maps. I have lived and worked in the Lower Mainland my entire life, one of the few people I know born and raised here. I am inherently connected through family, friends, and loved ones to these communities where gunfire at gas stations, grocery stores, and local restaurants has become all too common. For those paying attention, gang violence in the Lower Mainland is akin to an exhausting cycle, with police knocking one leader down only to have another rise up. As suggested by one participant in this research project, policing gangs in the Lower Mainland has turned into a high stakes game of ‘whac-a-mole’. In response to the sustained periods of violence, police organizations across BC have repeatedly iterated ‘we can’t arrest our way out of this’ leaving us with more questions than answers: How DO we get out of this mess? How DO we reduce gang violence? If we had the answers, this research would be irrelevant. I hope that one day, this will be the case. Until then, this research is dedicated to the victims, families, and communities that needlessly suffer as a result of gang violence. 4 Despite ongoing and extensive policy efforts to deter gang membership, gangs in Canada appear to be flourishing (Bolan, 2018b; Bouchard & Hashimi, 2017; CBC News, 2015; Dunbar; 2017). Gang violence remains a pressing public safety issue for police, policymakers, and communities, and maintains a significant presence in the policy agenda set by governments at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. Though violent crime rates continue a decades-long trend of decline, the estimated number of gangs and gang members in Canada has been on the increase (National Crime Prevention Centre, 2011; Public Safety Canada, 2018b). Policymaking rarely has a one-size fits all explanation and is often affected by both contextual and proximate influences (Miljan, 2018). In most cases, publicly elected officials and the bureaucrats employed in roles that support policy development and decision-making are at the focus of addressing policy issues and determining the appropriate policy tools to be deployed in response. In Canada’s system of federalism, criminal law and, therefore, the Criminal Code of Canada is the responsibility of the federal government (under section 91 of the Constitution Act). Yet, the responsibilities for the administration of justice fall to the Provincial Governments (under section 92). These legislative factors and the unique framework of policing in British Columbia (to be examined in greater detail in Chapter One) have rendered police in jurisdictions affected by gang violence the primary policy actors responsible for the development and implementation of policies related to the prevention, intervention, and suppression of gang violence. Given this, it is important to gather an understanding of police perspectives and understandings, which is the focus of this research. About this Study: Objectives and Research Questions In light of the gaps in the Canadian knowledge base, this dissertation sought to gather empirical data through qualitative interviews with 42 police officers and two civilians across three jurisdictions; Surrey, Delta, and Abbotsford. The intent was to contribute to the empirical literature by accurately recording the perceptions and experiences of police officers to deepen our understanding of what police in the Lower Mainland have been doing in response to gang violence, whether they believe their approaches are effective, and to develop a better 5 understanding of gangs in BC’s Lower Mainland.2 This research incorporates the views of police officers and their organizations as a productive element of the research process that is critical because there is a long history of mistrust between policing organizations and academics in Canada (Ricciardelli & Griffiths, 2017). This research is also an attempt to foster positive relationships with local police and to establish and develop trust and dialogue. While this approach to qualitative research is well established and widely accepted by the academic community, there are limitations to this methodology, including confirmation bias. The empirical data from this research study offers an excerpt of what is and is not perceived by police to be happening, what is working, where the challenges lie, and what should happen in policy response efforts to respond to gang violence by police on the frontline. The interviews sought to accomplish four key goals: 1) Ask police officers about their perceptions around the form and function of gangs in BC, their understandings of the organization and structure of gangs, their perceptions of the nature of gang activities, and how these views have or have not changed over time. 2) Ask police officers about their perceptions of the role of ethnicity and non-traditional risk factors3 for gang activity in the context of BC’s Lower Mainland. 3) Ask police officers about efforts in gang prevention, intervention, and suppression, and their perceptions of the efficacy of these efforts. 4) Ask police officers about the challenges to effectively responding to gangs in BC. The results of this study contribute to the empirical literature by (a) increasing our understanding of the gang prevention, intervention, and suppressions efforts of police in the lower mainland, (b) deepening our knowledge of these programs by considering efficacy from the perspective of police, (c) identifying barriers to effective policing strategies, and (d) offering the potential to 2 The Lower Mainland (LMD) is a name commonly applied to the region that includes the Metro Vancouver Regional District (23 authorities with a total approximate population of 2.46 million); and the Fraser Valley Regional District (6 authorities with a total approximate population of 296,000 people) (Census, 2016; Giacomantonio, 2015) . To further complicate things, the Metro Vancouver Regional District was formerly known as the Greater Vancouver Regional District until 2017. For this reason, you will see the terms Metro Vancouver and Greater Vancouver used interchangeably. 3 McConnell (2015) suggested that while gangs elsewhere are dominantly comprised of traditional notions of youth at-risk, BC has a large number of youth involved in gangs who do not appear to possess the typical antecedents to gang involvement including social, economic, and marginalization factors noted in the literature (p.144). Non-traditional at-risk youth include those whose journey into the gang lifestyle is fuelled by status, hedonism, and glamour rather than economic necessity or oppression (McConnell, 2015, p.145). McConnell’s (2015) definition builds upon the 2001 definition created by the BC Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General noting that non-traditional at-risk youth include those who come from well-functioning families with abundant financial resources and community attachments who are motivated to join gangs to fulfill needs related to power, protection, social status, a sense of belonging, and to make money. Traditional at-risk is associated with criminogenic factors including poverty, substance abuse, physical and/or mental abuse, discrimination, and poor parenting (Dong, Gibson & Krohn, 2015; Klein, 1995b; McConnell, 2015; Surrey, 2018) 6 inform policy and practices to increase the efficacy of responses to gang violence and promote community level interventions. Accepting that perception and reality are not always congruent, it is important recognize that the policy instruments developed in response to gang violence have been directly influenced by police officers and the institutions employing them, as well as community perceptions of the problem. This research recognizes that police officer perceptions of efficacy of operational approaches to gang issues does not constitute empirical support for or against a given policy/approach. However, these perceptions, as communicated by frontline police officers, offer an important perspective and a starting point for future research. Moreover, transmitting the challenges experienced by police organizations across three BC jurisdictions is an effort to contribute to improving policing policy and practice. To some degree, the intent in this dissertation is to break down some of the existing siloes by offering a platform through which challenges commonly experienced by the police are examined, to encourage and provide the opportunity for police organizations to learn from one another, and to foster opportunities for learning through knowledge transmission. Policing is not a hermetically sealed undertaking; their efforts are inherently connected to broader social and public health issues that are qualitatively different geographically across the country. Mental health and addictions, often termed concurrent disorders, cut across socioeconomic boundaries. Khan (2017) examined the 2012 Canadian Community Mental Health Survey and found that the distribution of concurrent disorder (defined as a mood/anxiety disorder combined with a substance use disorder) did not differ significantly by household education, employment, and household income.4 The popular image of drug users tends to involve individuals characterized by numerous socioeconomic challenges, and often involves representations of minorities and the urban poor (Sterk-Elifson, 1996). In 2017, medical health officer Dr. Silvina Mema of BC Interior Health noted that the introduction of fentanyl brought recognition that overdoses were occurring among the middle class. She noted that most overdose deaths among the middle class occurred in private and that middle-class drug users are among 4 To examine the complete table, visit https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-003-x/2017008/article/54853/tbl/tbl02-eng.htm 7 the most isolated and most difficult to reach with safe drug use messaging or harm reduction strategies, like naloxone, because drug use is so stigmatized (Penticton News, 2017). Because the police have been rendered the policy actors devising the responses to gangs in each jurisdiction, their perceptions fundamentally influence the policy tools that are devised and implemented. This research will consider the ways in which community-level issues related to addictions, mental health, and public health interact affecting the programs and policies devised and implemented by police. There have been numerous calls for the implementation of a public health approach to youth violence (Bolton, Maume, Halls and Smith, 2017; Gebo, 2016; Neville, Goodall, Gavine, Williams & Donnelly, 2015; WHO, 2016). Traditionally considered the purview of the criminal justice system, a public health approach instead “employs scientific methods, seeks to intervene at multiple levels (primary, secondary, tertiary), and advocates for the involvement of multidisciplinary stakeholders” (Neville et al., 2015, p.322). In the final chapter, the findings from this research suggests that the way forward is through police and community engagement with an effective and properly resourced public health and social welfare system, with a focus on broad community engagement and providing a supportive social safety net and much-needed treatment resources to those experiencing addiction. Until now, there has been little collaboration across social problems between police, criminologists, and public health researchers in Canada. This is likely the result of longstanding perceptions among researchers, clinicians, and policymakers that policing and public health have two fundamentally different approaches to reducing violence. This aside, there is a significant body of literature that suggests that a public health approach to violence is promising. As such, calls for the decriminalization of all illegal narcotics will also be considered (BC, 2019). The goal here is to provide the necessary assistance and support to those seeking treatment for addiction in an effort to reduce what has been, of late, an ever-increasing demand for supply of illicit narcotics, which is a key source of the problem. Efforts to address the demand for illicit drugs will reduce opportunities for predatory wealth accumulation and commodity enjoyment that entices young men who over-identify with hedonistic capitalism to become involved in gang activities. This general conclusion was noted by the police interviewed for this research as a hallmark of gangs in BC. There is little doubt that there are street entrenched youth participating in low-level drug dealing in the Lower Mainland (Fast, Shoveller, & Kerr, 2017). However, this is not the group receiving attention from the 8 media and the police in BC’s Lower Mainland and, therefore, police responses to this group is not the focus of this research. The contribution of this research to the social sciences is that it identifies and expands existing knowledge about the programs and policies in place to respond to persistent and ongoing gang violence in the Lower Mainland of BC. This information can be incorporated to inform future policy and practices to promote the efficacy of community-level responses. By no means is this research an effort at program evaluation. Moreover, this project does not seek to compare the responses of police in the three jurisdictions studied. It is clear that a potentially more productive way to present the findings would involve presenting the literature on the policy options at the forefront and then to examine the ways in which particular policy tools have been implemented in each of the jurisdictions. The three communities at the centre of this study are socioeconomically and demographically unique resulting in policing and police responses that differ based on the local context and considerations. Though I believe that a comparison of jurisdictional responses would be quite interesting, the ultimate goal of this dissertation is to build upon prior empirical examinations of the issue that can serve as a foundation upon which future theory and research may build, and to inform the evidence base that influences policy on police responses to gang violence in the Lower Mainland. In effect, this research is intended as the starting point to inform our understanding of what we know in the literature about gangs in in BC specifically, examine the literature on police responses to gangs, and catalogue police efforts and perceptions of those efforts in three BC communities. This thesis is divided into several sections. Chapters One and Two provide the context necessary to understand the nature of policing gang violence in BC, as well as an extensive examination of the literature on gang prevention, intervention, and suppression strategies. This is followed by the methods chapter and three findings chapters compiling the empirical data and findings from police interviews and offering suggestions for a way forward. Chapter One introduces gangs as a pressing policy issue and provides an overview of the definitional issues that challenge police across Canada, while outlining the problem of a general lack of baseline research on what police organizations in the Lower Mainland have done and are doing to respond to gang violence. This is followed by an overview of the complex nature of police jurisdictions in British Columbia, laying the groundwork for the challenges inherent in 9 responding to gang violence, and offering a glimpse of the socioeconomic and demographic conditions in each of the unique communities that are the focus of this research. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the role of migration and history of South Asian gangs in BC. Chapter Two offers an overview of the definitional debates that plague considerations of gang activity, considering first the historical perspective, contemporary efforts in academia to define gangs, and police definitions that vary widely across Canada. The chapter closes with a consideration of the need for an evidence base to inform future policy and practice. Chapter Three includes the suggestion that there exists a paucity of research on gangs in Canada generally and BC specifically. Though there is a significant body of literature stemming from the United States (US) on streets gangs and organized crime, cogent analysis signals that caution should be exercised in attempting to implement American-based responses to gangs given the notable differences between the United States’ and Canada’s criminal justice systems and related policies. This chapter also examines the limited scholarly literature on gang prevention, intervention, and suppression programs. The focus of this chapter is often on specific programs as they pertain to crime prevention more broadly because there is insufficient focus in the literature on the ways in which these programs have been adapted in efforts to reduce gang activity. Each of the programs reviewed in this chapter have been adapted and implemented by police in the three jurisdictions that are the subject of this research. The chapter concludes with a focus on the evaluations of the efficacy of these programs. Chapter Four outlines the modes of access, participant recruitment, selection processes, and ethical considerations in this qualitative research study. This chapter also provides an overview of the analytical framework, including important considerations of positionality, reflexivity, and the potential for bias. This chapter concludes with an examination of the ways in which themes were identified, derived from the data, and selected for inclusion. Chapter Five offers an overview of a long experienced, but less understood phenomenon, of dial-a-doping. Though nearly 20 years old as a delivery method for illicit narcotics, dial-a-doping has received little scholarly attention. The second half of this chapter positions the police as policy actors, offering a summary of the perceptions of police interviewed in three Lower Mainland jurisdictions on the form, function, and nature of gangs in British Columbia, considers police perceptions on the role of ethnicity, as well as perceptions of what have been termed ‘non- 10 traditional risk factors’ for gang activity (Bhatt & Tweed, 2018; McConnell, 2015; Surrey, 2018). Chapter Six offers empirical data on police responses to gang violence in terms of primary prevention, secondary intervention, and tertiary suppression strategies, and police perceptions of the efficacy of these efforts to determine ‘what works’ as perceived by the officers in charge of policy development and implementation in response to gang violence in BC. Though asking police officers what they think works should not be considered a proxy for formal evaluation, doing so offers a starting point, which is the nature of exploratory research of this kind. In considering the efficacy of these initiatives, officers frequently spoke of the structural barriers that they felt/believed/perceived prevented them from seeing more success. This included the notion that policing, by its very nature, is reactive and thus prevention and intervention are beyond the purview of police. It also includes a discussion of the effects of prolonged austerity measures in reducing the provincial capacity for effective addictions treatment and mental health response in BC, all of which will be examined in detail in Chapter Seven. Chapter Seven offers an overview of the ways in which an appropriately resourced and effective public health regime are presented in the literature as an effective response to violence. This is somewhat of a panacea given that all of the prior chapters allude to the failings of the social safety net in British Columbia, but it highlights one very important point; police perceptions of the structural barriers that have been created by the absence of an integrated addictions and mental health response, and treating drug addiction as a health crisis rather than criminal activity, has resulted in the police acting as the primary first responders for mental health issues and as untrained addictions counsellors. In this consideration, it is important to recognize that mental health and addictions cut across socioeconomic divisions in BC, and the police are the primary responders across the spectrum. The incapacity of the public health system to provide mental health and addictions to all British Columbians is an important consideration when examining police efforts to reduce gang violence because the importation and distribution of illegal narcotics that is the primary revenue source for gangs in BC has only become more lucrative with increasing demand. The police officers interviewed for this research indicated that for the past 15 years, criminal networks in BC have successfully imported illicit narcotics, and police have limited capacity to investigate these offences due to limited municipal resources. 11 This thesis concludes encouraging a consideration of the responsibility of the wider social safety net alongside the responsibility of the welfare state to provide security for its citizens, all of which are far beyond the capacity of the police to respond. The conclusion suggests that until there are effective mental health resources, publicly funded community-based addictions beds, and a community-involved, coordinated public health system capable of having an effect on the number of users across the socioeconomic classes, local demand for illicit narcotics is likely to continue to increase. This local demand fuels the underground economy in which gang members are accumulating the levels of predatory wealth that fuel the capitalist culture at the very foundation of the non-traditional risk factors for gang participation in BC’s Lower Mainland. 12 Chapter 1. Gang Violence as a Policy Problem Across Canada, gangs are perceived to be a serious crime problem though their nature and form differ geographically (Gordon, 2000; McConnell, 2015; Wortley, 2010). Policy responses to gang violence are developed by police without a critical mass of scholarly research on gangs in Canada and in the absence of an evidence base as to ‘what works’ given the dearth of evaluations to demonstrate the efficacy of gang prevention, interdiction, and suppression strategies. This chapter will offer an overview of gangs as a policy problem and provide national gang-related homicide data5 to contextualize the issue and support the assertion that gangs remain a pressing policy issue both nationally and in BC’s Lower Mainland. Taken together, this information offers evidence that gang violence remains prevalent on the policy agenda at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. Next, this chapter seeks to highlight that policing in British Columbia is incredibly complex by providing an overview of the structural challenges related to the form and function of policing in BC and scanning the Lower Mainland’s policing and reporting jurisdictions. In so doing, a cursory examination of the demographic characteristics of the three cities included in this study is provided. This chapter highlights a particular emphasis on the ‘patchwork’ nature of policing in BC, a term coined by the honorable justice Wally Oppal in his report in response to BC’s missing and murdered women. This is important because it offers the groundwork for understanding the siloed nature of policy responses rendered as such by the structural challenges experienced by police in the Lower Mainland. This chapter will also provide contextualization offering information about the history of the South Asian Diaspora in BC along with a brief analysis of the racialized and often problematic discourse surrounding South Asian gangs in the Lower Mainland. The chapter will conclude with an overview of the history of South Asian Gangs in BC situating the context upon which police responses in BC have been formulated. 5 A homicide is classified as gang-related when police confirm or suspect that the accused person and/or victim was either a member or a prospective member of an organized crime group or street gang or was somehow associated with an organized crime group or street gang, and the homicide was carried out as a result of that association (Juristat, 2017). Prior to 2005, police were asked if the homicide was "gang-related". In 2005, the question was amended to give police the option of specifying whether the homicide was (a) confirmed as gang-related or (b) suspected as being gang-related (Juristat, 2016). 13 Gang Related Homicide in Canada In some areas of Canada, gangs are perceived to conform with the traditional notions of street gangs; they involve local crews and neighbourhood-based activities, often focusing on low-level drug dealing (Wortley, 2010). In other areas of Canada, BC in particular, gangs often (though not always) appear more as organized criminal operations with suspected links to international drug trafficking and other nefarious actions that reach far beyond local communities (Beare & Hogg, 2013; McConnell, 2015). The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) noted that there are common misconceptions about gangs, including that “gangs are depicted primarily along racial lines, with origins in impoverished areas of the inner city” and posited that “The reality in Vancouver is quite different” (2010, p.9).6 In 2018, The Surrey Mayor’s task force on gang violence prevention suggested that gangs in BC come from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, operate like a business driven by profit, use violence to control their illicit drug market, and frequently live in one city but conduct their illicit business activities and violence in another (2018, p.7). The task force concluded that “BC appears to possess a unique and evolving gang landscape” noting that gangs in the region “possess characteristics which appear to be unlike any other region experiencing gang violence” (2018, p.6). The violence associated with gang activity remains a pressing public safety issue and continues to garner the attention of policymakers and police. It is important to note that homicide rates are not always a reliable indicator of the degree of gang violence or the public’s perception of crime because much gang-related violence is sub-lethal in nature, either by design or happenstance. That aside, homicide data is productive because unlike less lethal forms of violence, there is virtually no dark figure of crime7 associated with this type of violence with much higher rates of homicides reported to police than other violent offences (Nivette, 2011). In an effort to provide context regarding the levels of gang violence in British Columbia, national gang related homicide data will first be examined. Beginning in 2005, gang related 6 Street level/entry level youth gangs in Vancouver are typically made up of young people from their early teens to 20’s, generally associated to specific neighborhoods within communities. These gangs are loosely organized and have very little structure and are involved in various crimes, including low-level drug trafficking, robberies, extortions, and property crime. It is uncommon for individuals in these gangs to move up to higher levels of criminal activity where it is perceived there is more “wealth, status, and power” (VPD, 2010, p.10). 7 Refers to the variation between the number of crimes that occur and the number of crimes that are actually reported to the police (Morden & Palys, 2019). 14 homicide in Canada saw a gradual increase to a peak level in 2008 and 2009. Since then, several years of subsequent decline in gang-related homicide followed until 2016, when it peaked again with 140 reported gang-related homicides in Canada. This represents an increase of 45 gang-related homicides from the 96 reported in 2015 and was higher than the previous peak in 2008 (see Figure 3). Figure 3. Homicide in Canada/Number Confirmed as Gang Related, 2005-2018 (Juristat, 2016). Gang-related homicides accounted for more than 30% of all homicides in Canada in 2016, and more than 40% of homicides in the Vancouver and the Abbotsford-Mission Census Metropolitan Areas (Juristat, 2016).8 Those numbers have continued to increase with 660 homicides in Canada in 2017, 163 of which were identified as gang-related, the highest level recorded from 2005 to 2017. In 2018, there was a slight decline with nine fewer homicides and six fewer gang related homicides in Canada compared to 2017. Although homicide only accounts for less than 1% of all violent crimes in Canada, it is still the most devastating criminal offence, and it negatively affects victim’s families, the broader communities in which they live, and puts significant strain on the resources of the Canadian criminal justice system (Boyce, Cotter, & Perreault, 2013). Howell, Egley, Tita, and Griffiths (2011) conducted a longitudinal analysis 8 In the course of this research, it became clear that Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) are inherently problematic for the analysis of crime data. For example, Abbotsford and Mission are included in the same CMA but are actually separate communities policed by different organizations. Abbotsford has its own municipal service, while policing in Mission is conducted through a contract with the RCMP. These organizations collect data differently rendering it impossible to simply add their statistics together to the CMA scale. 01002003004005006007002005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018Homicides - Canada Identified as Gang Related 15 examining trends related to gang activity in American cities over a 14-year period and found that, in 70% of cities with populations greater than 100,000 people, between 20% and 40% of homicide could be attributed to gang activity. Moreover, they concluded that levels of gang activity were unaffected by anti-gang efforts in more than two-third of those cities. Despite the fact that I will caution in Chapter Three that American gang research may not be directly applicable to the Canadian experience, this is an important study because it suggests that there exists a significant need for ongoing and persistent evaluation of police efforts in gang prevention, intervention, and suppression programs. Gang Violence – a Policy Issue in British Columbia BC has a long history of intense gang violence (Bouchard & Hashimi, 2017; British Columbia Task Force on Illegal Firearms, 2017; Gravel, Wong & Simpson, 2018; Jingfors, Lazzano, & McConnell, 2015; Office of the Premier, 2009). According to the 2002 Canadian Police Survey on Youth Gangs9, Surrey and Vancouver were the first cities in Canada to report youth gang activity, beginning in 1975 and 1979 respectively. Gangs appear to have become far more prevalent in BC’s Lower Mainland since the 1980s, as evidenced by the increased levels of gang violence (VPD, 2010; Surrey, 2018). In the 1980s, a handful of gangs controlled the criminal drug markets in BC. Today, the CFSEU-BC10 believes that there are more than 188 criminal groups vying for control of BC’s formidable illicit drug market. Some more influential gangs in BC have let longstanding rivalries pass and are forming enterprise-driven alliances in an effort to capture a monopoly on the illicit market (CFSEU-BC, 2015c). The level of violence attributable to gangs in the Lower Mainland is troubling, and community and political concerns over this violence have intensified over time (Bouchard & Hashimi, 2017; British Columbia Task Force on Illegal Firearms, 2017). The Canada 2016 Crime & Safety Report on Vancouver published by the US Department of State suggested that Vancouver is considered the epicentre of 9 In one of the few national research projects on gangs, more than 264 police organizations from across Canada participated in this study, which found there to be 484 different youth gangs operating across Canada with an estimated 6,760 gang members. At that time, Asian gangs were thought to dominate the west coast (Chettleburgh, 2007). 10 The Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit of British Columbia is British Columbia’s integrated anti-gang police agency. The CFSEU-BC is the largest integrated police program in Canada made up of members from every police department in BC, including the RCMP, and are the third largest police force in the province with over 400 officers (CFSEU-BC, 2019). 16 a US$7 billion annual drug trade and that tensions between international drug distribution networks that involve a series of key players, including localized gangs who control drug territory and sales across the Lower Mainland, are high (OSAC, 2016). In April 2016, then BC Premier Christy Clark announced the ‘Guns and Gangs Strategy’, a $23 million-dollar infusion of funds to support police and prosecutors in combatting gangs. Premier Clark said “the frequency and public nature of recent gang shootings is unacceptable and demands this additional, strategic deployment of resources. People deserve to feel safe no matter where they live in BC” (Bolan, 2016b). In November 2017, while visiting the city of Surrey, then Federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale announced more than $327 million dollars in new funding towards anti-gang initiatives across Canada (Bolan, 2017). In January 2019, Public Safety Canada announced a $7.5 million-dollar grant for the Surrey Anti-Gang Family Empowerment program, also known as SAFE (Zytaruk, 2019). The continued infusion of federal funding to address Lower Mainland gang problems is indicative of the perceived severity of gangs in the area and acknowledged a need for a larger and more coordinated response. Gang violence continues to garner considerable public and media attention and is viewed by many to be one of the most significant crime-related issues in the Lower Mainland (APD, 2017; CFSEU 2015a; Surrey, 2018). Perhaps surprisingly, there appears to be an inverse relationship between the level of concern over gang-related crime and academic research on the issue. Skogan (2014) argued that the frequency with which a topic appears in the literature is not necessarily a reflection of its degree of public importance, but a reflection of the relative ease with which that type of research can be conducted. Pawelz (2018) noted that efforts to research populations that operate in “spheres of illegality and violence” are hindered by issues related to moral and ethical concerns, issues of rivalry, distrust, and inaccessibility (p.1). Given the difficulty in obtaining access, potential for jeopardy, and intense research ethics process and required protocols (Pawelz, 2018), the lack of meaningful research on gangs and gang members in the Lower Mainland is unsurprising. The continued presence of this issue on the municipal, provincial, and federal policy agendas results from years of sustained gang violence. British Columbia has experienced a high number of gang-related shootings, many of which have resulted in fatalities (Bouchard & Hashimi, 2017; Gravel et al., 2018; Jingfors et al., 2015). As noted previously, homicide is not the most accurate representation of levels of gang violence but is used here because the data is 17 reliable and available, whereas other data related to less lethal gang-related violence is not. A key finding of the 2018 Surrey Mayor’s task force on gang violence prevention: Findings and action steps was that there is limited available data on gang-violence. That report also compared rates of homicide in BC to national homicide data to represent the nature of gang violence regionally comparing homicide rates per 100,000 in the population. Their findings indicated that rates of gang violence in BC have been consistently higher than the national average since 2000 (see Figure 4). Figure 4. Gang-related Homicides, Canada and British Columbia, 1999 to 2016 rate per 100,000 population. 11 According to the CFSEU-BC, between 2006 and 2015, a total of 344 homicides or attempted homicides were committed in BC, most commonly using a firearm, with 172 resulting in a fatality (CFSEU-BC, 2015a; McConnell, 2015). The average age of all homicide victims in BC during the 2006-2008 peak years of gang conflict was 28 years old, and many of the victims or intended victims were associated with gangs, including the United Nations, Red Scorpions, 11 https://www.surrey.ca/bylawsandcouncillibrary/DCT_Mayors_Task_Force_Findings_Report.pdf 18 and Bacon Brothers (CFSEU-BC, 2015a). Bouchard and Hashimi (2017) concluded that “there is little doubt that BC’s Lower Mainland (LMD), which includes the Greater Vancouver area, has witnessed an increase in gang violence over the last few years” (p. 200). In their findings, they demonstrated that the major conflict between the Red Scorpions/Bacon Brothers and the United Nations gang defined a single, long, and deadly wave of gang violence in the Lower Mainland that began in October 2008 and lasted until November 2009. After a reduction in homicide levels commencing in 2011, gang-related violence rose intermittently, and gang-related homicide12 in BC peaked again in 2017 (see Figure 5). Figure 5. Homicide in British Columbia /Number Identified as Gang Related, 2005-2018.13 Unfortunately, information with respect to suspected gang membership is not collected in the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) data. Much of the data obtained for this research was obtained with permission to reprint from the CFSEU-BC and are not publicly available. As a result, not only is there a lack of research on BC gangs, but there is a dearth of information available that would allow policymakers to measure this phenomenon over time (Surrey, 2018). 12 According to the CFSEU-BC (2018), a gang-related homicide is considered as such when one member involved in the homicide was a member or associate of an organized crime group and the incident was committed to gain material, financial and/or power-based benefits for the group. 13 Source: Statistics Canada, Table 253 000 0204060801001202005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018Homicides - BC Identified as Gang Related - BC 19 Despite a decline in the homicide rate, the Lower Mainland continues to experience gang violence that seriously threatens public safety in the form of brazen shootings during daylight hours, between vehicles, and at busy intersections (Bolan, 2015; Bolan 2018b). Advances in health care and technology have significantly reduced the likelihood of firearms-related deaths and, therefore, gang-related violence is increasingly reflected in the crime statistics as attempted murder, aggravated assaults, and assault with a weapon (Dyer, 2014). Medical advances were demonstrated when Jujhar Khun-Khun, a well-known member of the ‘Dhak-Duhre group’ and affiliated with the United Nations Gang, was, on two separate occasions, the victim of multiple gunshot wounds and survived both times after significant medical intervention. Of note, in 2018, Khun-Khun was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to serve 18 years for his involvement in the infamous murder of rival gang member Jonathan Bacon (Jamie Bacon’s older brother) at Okanagan Delta Grand Hotel in Kelowna on August 14, 2011 (Bolan, 2018c). Persistent gang violence in BC must be considered in the context of the broader social welfare and public health conditions. In recent years, fiscal austerity efforts have had important consequences for those who rely on the social welfare state, as well as for those who require mental health support. Evans (2018) argued that, at the national level, the restructuring of the welfare state over the past 25 years has resulted in a substantial decrease in welfare benefits, with monthly social benefits payments falling below the standard of minimum wage, significant decreases in social transfers to provinces, and the implementation of mandatory participation in employment programs as an eligibility requirement for benefits across numerous provinces. Evans (2018) concluded that in BC austerity initiatives over the past thirty years have fundamentally restructured state–society relations and have shifted (privatized, downloaded) risk, responsibilities, and burdens onto the shoulders of groups and individuals that were seldom, if ever, the agents responsible for provincial budget woes (p.23). Levitas (2012) posited that the mantra of austerity has been leveraged against the allegedly excessive benefits and privileges stemming from an overtly generous and often abused welfare state, thereby shifting the responsibility from the state back onto the individual. This has fostered a culture of individualism in direct contrast to the principles of collective responsibility for community and social well-being. During the 1990s and 2000s, Canada’s social assistance system transitioned from a centralized program with federal administrative controls to a decentralized variety of programs administered by each province (Berg & Gabel, 2015). By 20 1993, the federal government had effectively eliminated $1.2 billion dollars from transfer payments to the province (Donnan, 2014). The passage of the Canada Health and Welfare Reform Social Transfer in 1996 resulted in the elimination of an additional $1.8 billion dollars from provincial transfer payments and removed most federal policies regarding how provinces managed their income assistance programs. This resulted in each province developing vastly disparate income assistance programs aimed at reducing the number of income assistance recipients (Berg & Gabel, 2015). Donnan (2014) posited that, although each province administered welfare differently, “all provinces opted to make welfare payments punishingly low and the national unemployment insurance plan was redesigned to exclude part-time, temporary and many other workers from the opportunity to receive benefits” (p. 589). This was particularly true in BC where, during the ten-year period from 2007-2017, income assistance benefits for a single person remained at $610 per month without increase (Klein & Reano, 2017). In September 2017, the newly elected provincial NDP government increased income assistance in BC by $100 to $710 per month, which amounts to $8,520 annually or approximately $23 per day. For context, in 1986, welfare recipients in BC received $8,357 annually in assistance payments; this despite enormous and ongoing year over year increases in the cost of living (Tweddle, Battle, & Torjman, 2016). During the welfare reformation changes in the mid-1990’s, each province developed noticeably different regimes under which individuals on social assistance could join the workforce on a part-time basis and keep a portion of that income without penalty, known as the earning exemption. In BC, the earning exemption from 2007-2017 allowed individuals to keep the first $200 of their net monthly earnings, but any additional income earned after that point was reduced dollar for dollar (Tweddle et al., 2016). In October 2017, this was raised to $400 per month. This means that a single individual working part time earning $400 per month and receiving the maximum benefits available under income assistance in BC would be living on approximately $13,320 annually (BC Government, 2018). The costs of housing in BC are widely known to be among the highest in Canada, with the costs of a bachelor rental apartment in Vancouver rising at double the inflation rate between 2005 and 2015 from $680 to $922 (Tweddle et al., 2016). An understanding of this crisis is important for understanding both the policing regime in BC and the socioeconomic conditions in which gangs have become increasingly fiscally prosperous. 21 Fiscal austerity measures related to social welfare and public health combined with the privileging of efficacy and productivity has transformed policing in Canada in two significant ways. The first way that austerity measures have fundamentally changed policing in BC results from the deinstitutionalization of mental health patients, the limited availability of community-based mental health services, and the concomitant increase in use of illicit narcotics among mentally ill individuals (BC Coroners Service, 2019). In 2008, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) released a report titled Lost in Transition: How a Lack of Capacity in the Mental Health System is Failing Vancouver’s Mentally Ill and Draining Police Resources. One key finding was that, on average, one-third of all police calls for service in Vancouver involved one or more persons apparently suffering from a mental health issue. The VPD has since argued that the scarcity of mental health resources in BC rendered informal means of managing a person suffering from a mental health crisis a serious challenge (VPD, 2013). Mental illness affects one in five people in Canada of all ages, education, income levels, and culture, and people with mental illness are twice as likely to have a substance use problem compared to the general population (CAMH, 2020). The persistent lack of a healthy and functioning social safety net has fundamentally changed the types of calls police respond to with a significant effect on police resources. Though not a direct subject of inquiry in this dissertation, the austerity measures that effectively decimated the social safety net of addictions treatment, community-based mental health support, and the social welfare state more broadly, and the subsequent lack of investment and resources in these services, has resulted in a crisis of addictions in BC, fuelling demand for supply of the illicit narcotics that are at the centre of the profit-driven gang problem (Surrey, 2018) In April of 2016, Dr. Perry Kendall declared a public health emergency under the Public Health Act (the first declaration of its kind in Canada) in response to the increasing number of overdoses and overdose deaths in BC. While media discourses of the fentanyl crisis are predominantly focused on those who experience a wide array of issues related to marginalization, the use of fentanyl has spread widely through BC communities, traversing socioeconomic boundaries. In August of 2016, a 16 year old girl died of a fentanyl overdose in the washroom of a Starbucks in Port Moody (Clancy & Johnson, 2016). At the time of her death, she was employed as a gymnastics instructor and entering grade 12. In media interviews, her mother expressed enormous grief saying she recognized and had sought rehab treatment for her 22 daughter, finding that publicly funded treatment required months of waiting and private clinics were far beyond her means at $50,000 (Clancy & Johnson, 2016). That year, 12 young people between the ages of 14 and 18 years old died of overdose, half of which were deemed to be fentanyl related. The emergency declaration offered new powers to the provincial health officer to obtain real-time information on drug overdose deaths across BC. In response to the state of emergency, the BC Centre for Disease Control implemented priorities of overdose surveillance and implemented and expanded harm reduction programs, including providing take home naloxone kits (more than 40,000 in 2017 alone) free of charge across the province.14 Uptake across the province was slow but steady and today most police officers, firefighters, and paramedics also carry naloxone kits. To encourage users to call emergency services in the event of an overdose, police services in BC have adopted a policy that they will not attend overdose calls unless requested to do so or if they are the only available first responders. Despite this policy, police officers in BC deploy naloxone and prevent overdose deaths on a daily basis (BC, 2019). The result has been a significant decrease in the number of deaths annually (see Figure 6). Figure 6. Illicit Drug Toxicity Deaths and Death Rate per 100,000 Population. Source: BC Coroners Service 14 https://towardtheheart.com/naloxone 23 While this may be lauded as a success, there is an ongoing dearth of resources available to individuals living with substance use concerns. Keeping individuals suffering from serious addiction alive by repeatedly administering naloxone is less than ideal. Indeed, in 2016, the Canadian Mental Health Association in BC maintained that: There is an urgent need to build a truly integrated continuum of care for addiction in British Columbia. The current reality in British Columbia is that our system is fragmented, uncoordinated, and inaccessible. People who use the various levels of addiction care in British Columbia often describe a system that is not designed for the person seeking recovery in mind. In fact, some have argued that there is no system of addictions care in our province. For example, when someone arrives at a point ready for treatment, the service they could use and are willing to use has a waitlist, is far from their home community, or has such restrictive criteria that they are ineligible (p.4). The BC Centre on Substance Use (2018) concluded that “British Columbia has long suffered because of the lack of an effective system to support individuals in and pursuing recovery from substance use disorders” and “British Columbia must also establish a full evidence-based continuum of care including building an effective and coordinated addiction treatment and recovery system that has traditionally been lacking” (p.5). The Canadian Mental Health Association (BC) argued a similar position: Our system is structured in a way where we are leaving people behind and allowing them to get to stage four before we respond to their needs. We are waiting until someone’s health has deteriorated to a crisis point, where the outcomes involve family breakup, exclusion from the community, loss of employment, hospitalization, incarceration, and sometimes death. In our health care system, we have made every effort to address chronic diseases, such as cancer, far earlier than stage four. There is a clear need to act before stage four in addiction care too (CMHA BC, 2016, p.9). The Vancouver Police Department (2017) released a report titled The Opioid Crisis – The Need for Treatment on Demand that argued that the long-term paucity of funding has resulted in only minimally available treatment assistance with a notable lack of evidence-based addiction treatment services available in BC. This has resulted in a situation where treatment is the least supported of the five pillars approach to substance dependency. The VPD recognizes that our expertise lies in public safety and not in addictions treatment. However, we cannot arrest our way out of the opioid crisis. As first responders, we routinely come across individuals who require addiction care but have nowhere to turn. First responders are uniquely positioned to help refer individuals to treatment services. Unfortunately, there is a lack of services that are immediately accessible. This usually means that the cycle of addiction and crime continues (VPD, 2017, p.21). In 2017, the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (CCJS) began collecting data on opioid related offences, which excludes heroin but includes fentanyl. In 2018, there were 2,490 of these 24 police-reported offenses across Canada, a rate of seven incidents per 100,000 in the population. BC reported the highest number of opioid related offenses at a rate three times the national average at 21 per 100,000 in the population.15 The VPD (2017) report on the opioid crisis concludes with five recommendations: 1) Expand federal and provincial government support and accountability. 2) Expand and provide more funding for evidence-based addiction treatment including opioid assisted therapy programs. 3) Create a system for immediate evidence-based addiction treatment and concurrent mental health crisis intervention and support. 4) Address the lack of health care information to allow the creation of data-driven strategies. 5) Increase public awareness to support prevention through education in line with the prevention and treatment pillars of the four pillars drug strategy (p.22-24). With the exception of the proliferation of naloxone, little has changed since these recommendations were made in 2017. Efforts to promote public awareness of the risks of fentanyl are substantial. The Know Your Source website (see Figure 7) is a VPD led fentanyl awareness resource developed in partnership with the RCMP, the BC Ambulance Service, Fraser Health Authority, Vancouver Coastal Health, the Provincial Health Services Authority, and the BC Centre for Disease Control (VPD, 2017). Figure 7. Awareness Posters Available for Public Download at www.knowyoursource.ca. 15 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article/00013/tbl/tbl04-eng.htm 25 When there is insufficient funding and a lack of coordination for substance abuse treatment, everyone pays in the form of ‘downstream’ medical and mental health costs, and there continue to be community concerns about crime and other challenges. The mental health consequences of untreated addiction often cost much more than providing substance abuse care (VPD, 2017). Fiscal austerity has also had serious and detrimental effects for those experiencing mental illness or depression. The Canadian Mental Health Association (BC) noted the dearth of mental health support: A recent study indicated that only about half of British Columbians diagnosed with depression are receiving adequate treatment. But a closer look at this data paints an even starker picture. Among the 108,000 individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder, only 13 percent (14,047) received minimally adequate counseling or psychotherapy sessions. Also, among those between ages 19 to 25, even less than half (40.2 per cent) received minimally adequate treatment (2016, p.10). The lack of funding for both substance abuse and mental health in British Columbia has had important consequences for health care. Brain injuries and HIV and hepatitis C infections that result from non-fatal overdoses have enormous negative outcomes for individuals. These medical consequences are unnecessary, expensive, and avoidable (VPD, 2017). The BC Coroners Service Death Review Panel titled Police: A Crucial Component of BC’s Mental Health System (2019) offered recent data indicating that approximately 25% of police encounters across the province had a mental health component rendering the police the primary providers and initial contact point for individuals experiencing mental health crises. In fact, the first of three recommendations in the report was to “incorporate the role of policing within the provincial mental health and addictions strategy” (p.8). This is counter to the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security Economics of Policing report which recommended that governments constitutionally responsible for health care work in collaboration with local police forces through the health care system to achieve better practices when dealing with persons having mental health problems and illnesses, outside of the police being the first and only line of response (2014, p.17). Police organizations are, by their very nature, reactive. The 9-1-1 system is the very foundation of this model in which an incident occurs, is reported to emergency services, triaged based on risk, and a police officer is deployed to respond. Police are not trained as frontline mental health responders, nor does it seem that a best practice form of care is an untrained or inadequately trained police officer serving in the role of mental health first responder, armed 26 with a firearm (Griffiths, Murphy, & Snow, 2014). Moreover, the Blue Ribbon Panel on Crime Reduction (2014) concluded that police officers as primary mental health and addictions responders was particularly unhelpful for those individuals in need of services from qualified health professionals (BC, 2014). Russell and Taylor (2015) argued that police organizations become the default responders when all other elements of the community safety web have failed because social service organizations have been under-resourced. Policing in British Columbia British Columbia is the westernmost province in Canada. The province borders Alberta to its east, the Pacific Ocean to its west, the Yukon and Northwest Territories to the north, and the state of Washington in the United States to the south. The province also borders the Alaska Panhandle on the Pacific coast and the states of Idaho and Montana on its southeast side. The geography of the province presents major challenges to providing the required range of policing services to ensure community safety and security. Spread over 944,000 square kilometers (km) of land, BC is home to more than 4.6 million people with two-thirds of the population concentrated in the southern 10% of the Province (Census, 2016). The British North America Act of 1867 allocated the responsibility for policing in Canada to the provincial governments based on the administration of justice authority in section 92(14). Ultimately, the province is responsible for policing. The province of British Columbia does not have its own provincial police force. Instead, municipalities either contract the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to provide policing or have established separate municipal police departments. Consequently, the Provincial Police Services Agreement (PPSA) and the master Municipal Policing Agreement (MPA) are negotiated between the federal government who provide the RCMP Services, and the province of BC who contract them for provincial policing. From there, negotiations continue in the development of a Municipal Police Unit Agreement (MPUA) between the provincial government (essentially the general contractor who subcontracts to the RCMP) and the municipality. Though technically the responsibility of the province, from an operational perspective, policing responsibilities have been delegated to municipalities that provide the majority of policing services in Canada (Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, 2014). The PPSA also guides Indigenous policing, as well as community tripartite agreements (CTA) and band councils. 27 In Canada, municipal police forces serve 77% of all Canadians. For municipalities with at least 15,000 inhabitants, local government bears 90% of the cost of policing, with 10% paid by the Canadian government. For smaller municipalities of less than 15,000, Ottawa generally contributes 30% of the total cost of policing. In effect, municipal governments pay the salaries of two out of every three police officers in Canada, and policing and public safety costs currently make up 20% to 50% of municipal budgets depending on the community (House of Commons, 2014). The RCMP has been providing contract policing to the provinces and territories on a cost-sharing basis since 1928 when the first provincial agreement was signed. Currently, each participating province and territory has a Provincial (or Territorial) Policing Agreement (PPSA or TPSA) with terms requiring the Province or Territory to pay 70% and the federal government to pay 30% of the provincial or territorial policing costs. The current Provincial Policing Service Agreements (PPSA), including the British Columbia agreement, were signed in 2012 and are in effect until 31 March 2032. Across BC, municipalities policed by the RCMP are under contract until 2032.16 As expected, police resources are not equal across the jurisdictions, with Surrey experiencing the highest crime rate and highest officer caseload (see Table 1). Abbotsford has the highest population per officer with 685 residents per police officer in that community. Delta has the lowest crime rate, lowest caseload, and vastly different staffing levels with a significantly lower population per officer. Concordantly, the per capita costs for police resources in 2017 were highest in Delta. Table 1. Police Resources in Each Research Jurisdiction, 2017 17 16 As with any contract, there are terms stipulating the conditions necessary to terminate the RCMP’s municipal policing contracts. 17 Data taken from Police Resources in BC, 2017. JURISDICTION POPULATION POLICE STRENGTH POP PER OFFICER CRIME RATE OFFICER CASELOAD $ PER CAPITA SURREY 556,902 831 670 77 52 $283 ABBOTSFORD 145,184 206 685 66 45 $342 DELTA 103,675 185 556 45 25 $354 28 Patchwork Quilt – Police Jurisdictions in the Lower Mainland Policing in the Lower Mainland is unlike many other major metropolitan areas in Canada, where one policing organization is typically responsible for the city center and surrounding suburbs (Giacomantonio, 2015). Examples of this model include Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal. In contrast, policing arrangements in the Lower Mainland are relatively fragmented and largely decentralized (Oppal, 2012). When there are a large number of governing bodies in a given metropolitan area, the result is often what scholars have called ‘fragmentation’, a construct that the urban and metropolitan literature has been concerned with for nearly 100 years (Wolman, 2019). Wolman (2019) suggested that fragmentation leads to problems of efficiency, including difficulties in addressing problems crossing local borders, problems of coordination, such as the duplication of efforts, the inability to take advantage of economies of scale, and costly and zero-sum competitions among local governments for tax base that occurs when local governments raise a significant share of their revenues through a local property or sales tax. In addition, severe equity problems may arise in fiscal systems where local governments raise revenue through local sources in the absence of equalizing grants from higher levels of government (Wolman, 2019). To varying degrees, these concerns related to fragmentation are present in the Lower Mainland of BC where there are 19 police jurisdictions reporting to 31 authorities. In total, 13 police agencies are municipally contracted RCMP detachments and six are municipal police departments (see Table 2). POLICE ORGANIZATION MUNICIPAL MUNICIPAL REPORTING STRUCTURE Vancouver Police Department Yes City of Vancouver West Vancouver Police Department Yes District of West Vancouver New Westminster Police Department Yes City of New Westminster Delta Police Department Yes Corporation of Delta, Tsawassen First Nation Abbotsford Police Department Yes City of Abbotsford Port Moody Police Yes City of Port Moody UBC RCMP Regional District Electoral Area A North Vancouver RCMP District of North Vancouver, City of North Vancouver Burnaby RCMP City of Burnaby Richmond RCMP City of Richmond 29 Coquitlam RCMP City of Coquitlam, City of Port Coquitlam, Village of Belcarra, Village of Anmore Surrey RCMP City of Surrey White Rock RCMP City of White Rock Ridge Meadows RCMP City of Pitt Meadows, City of Maple Ridge Langley RCMP City of Langley, Township of Langley Mission RCMP District of Mission, FVRD Electoral Areas F&G, Sumas First Nation Chilliwack RCMP City of Chilliwack Upper Fraser Valley RCMP District of Hope, Village of Harrison Hot Springs, District of Kent Squamish RCMP Municipality of Bowen Island, Municipality of Lions Bay Table 2. Police Organizations in the Lower Mainland. Author’s Own. In response to concerns of fragmentation, calls for a regionalized policing model have consistently emerged and re-emerged for more than two decades. The Honorable Justice Wally Oppal in his report, Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry noted that “the critical police failure to address cross-jurisdictional issues and ineffective co-ordination between police forces and agencies is directly attributable to the fragmentation of policing in the Lower Mainland” (2012, p.258). He concluded that: Criminal activity will always operate across jurisdictional boundaries; the more jurisdictional boundaries there are in a geographically contained area, the more complex the policing structure will be due to an increase in the number of separate police forces. The greater the complexity, the more the map of the police force resembles a patchwork. This is directly related to the greater challenge of cooperation, and concomitant increased chances of inter-jurisdictional failures. Greater Vancouver has the most complex policing structure of any metropolitan area in Canada’ (2012, p.258). Giacomantonio (2015) concluded that the arrangement of police services in BC is in constant flux, and suggested that the ‘political problematic’ of Lower Mainland policing is the result of a combination of issues, including multi-jurisdictional work and resource sharing, the unique RCMP presence in the region, and the persistent socioeconomic divides in policing provision (p.38). That said, the potential for a regionalized model remains constrained by the weight of inertia as significant cooperation among and across municipalities would be required to change the system. 30 Much of the infrastructure, including shared public transit lines, bordering roadways and highways, bridges, and waterways in the Lower Mainland traverse individual policing jurisdictions. Beyond this, there are several challenges for police, including numerous international cargo and tourist ports, four international land border crossings, two international airports, and proximity to the largely unmanned international border with the US. The financial and operational reporting structure for many of these police organizations is complicated. In numerous instances, police organizations report to more than one municipally elected council (see Table 2). For example, the North Vancouver RCMP report to both the district of North Vancouver and the City of North Vancouver. The Coquitlam RCMP report to Coquitlam City council, the Port Coquitlam City Council, the Village of Anmore, and the Village of Belcarra. The Langley RCMP report to the City of Langley and the Township of Langley. The Ridge Meadows RCMP report to the City of Maple Ridge and the City of Pitt Meadows. The Upper Fraser Valley RCMP report to the District of Hope, the Village of Harrison Hot Springs, and the District of Kent. This fragmentation results in competing priorities even within policing jurisdictions. The landscape of policing in the Lower Mainland is important because it has relevance for efforts attempting a coordinated response and for the allocation of police resources throughout the various organizations. A map of Lower Mainland policing jurisdictions is provided in Figure 8, with RCMP jurisdictions presented in the color purple. Figure 8. Map of Metro Vancouver in the RCMP’s Lower Mainland District; RCMP in Purple. BC RCMP. 31 Policing in BC differs in two additional ways; the existence of a small provincial police service focused exclusively on organized crime and the existence of the regional transit police. Beyond the provincial policing services contracted by the province to the RCMP, BC also has a second provincial police force, the Organized Crime Agency of BC (OCABC). OCABC became a provincially designated policing unit under the BC Police Act in March 1999 replacing the Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit (CLEU) (CFSEU-BC, 2019). Since 1999, OCABC has grown to include 32 police officers and more than 200 civilian staff. Sworn in as designated provincial constables, police officers with OCABC have the same legislative authorities and powers as municipal and RCMP police officers. The Chief Constable of OCABC is also the Officer in Charge (OIC) of the CFSEU-BC and holds the rank of Assistant Commissioner in the RCMP, providing operational command and managerial oversight and direction to all OCABC and CFSEU-BC seconded personnel. This research includes interviews with employees of three policing organizations; the Surrey RCMP contracted to provide municipal policing services, the municipal Abbotsford Police Department, and the municipal Delta Police Department. In Abbotsford, the median household income is the lowest of the three communities, the unemployment rate is the highest, as is the portion of residents receiving government transfers, such as unemployment insurance and social assistance as their primary form of income. Delta has the highest levels of income, and lowest percentage of residents receiving government transfers. These economic differences are important to understanding the varying socioeconomic conditions in each community. Each of these three communities is unique with differing economic conditions, various strengths and challenges, along with significant and important commonalities and differences (see Table 3). Table 3. Economic Data by Jurisdiction from 2016 Census JURISDICTION MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME % EMPLOYMENT INCOME % GOVERNMENT TRANSFER % EMPLOYMENT RATE % UNEMPLOYMENT RATE BC $69,995 70.8% 11.1% 59.6 6.7 SURREY $77,492 72.0% 11.5% 61.2 5.3 ABBOTSFORD $72,511 72.3% 13.7% 61.2 6.6 DELTA $92,300 72.6% 10.1% 61.0 6.5 32 Surrey Surrey is centrally located in the Lower Mainland, approximately 30 kilometers east of downtown Vancouver. Incorporated in 1879, and a city since 1993, Surrey has been transforming from a suburban and rural community to a major metropolitan hub. In the early postwar period, Surrey was considered a small bedroom community, but since the 1960s, it has grown to become the second largest city in BC, and one of the fastest growing cities in Canada. Surrey includes six distinct districts: Fleetwood, Whalley / City Centre, Guildford, Newton, Cloverdale, and South Surrey. The 2016 Census indicated that the population of Surrey was 517,887 welcoming approximately 800 new residents each month (Surrey, 2017). This has resulted in a population increase of 10.6% since the 2011 census. The population of Surrey is relatively young compared with many other municipalities across Canada, with 161,955 people under the age of 25 (Census, 2016). Continued growth is expected, with Surrey’s population projected to increase by an additional 250,000 people over the next 30 years. Surrey has a very diverse community. Over 43% of residents have a first language that is not English, as demonstrated in Table 4. Table 4. Mother Tongue languages (English + Top 5) spoken in Surrey, Census 2016. The 2016 National Household Survey indicated that South Asian residents made up 32.5% of Surrey’s population, while representing 7.9% of BC’s total population (NHS, 2016). The most widely spoken language in Surrey is English, followed by Punjabi, which is spoken by 20.7% of Surrey’s residents, and Chinese at 6.4% (Statistics Canada, 2017a). The largest percentage of immigrants that arrived between 2011 and 2016 to Surrey are from India (41.3%). Surrey is also home to the largest school district in BC. The City of Surrey is home to the largest RCMP detachment in the country with 803 police officers in five district offices contracted to provide municipal policing (Bhayani & Thompson, 2017). The Surrey RCMP is currently TOTAL POPULATION SURREY 517,882 Mother Tongue English 247,685 Mother Tongue Punjabi 106,100 Mother Tongue Mandarin 22,885 Mother Tongue Tagalog 17,540 Mother Tongue Hindi 13,260 Mother Tongue Korean 8,065 33 experiencing a period of transiton because on February 27, 2020 the BC Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor Gneeral gave the approval for the City of Surrey to proceed with the formation of a municipal police department in Surrey (Surrey, 2020). Abbotsford Abbotsford is the largest municipality by land mass in BC, and the fifth most populous city in the province with a population of approximately 141,397 (Census, 2016). Nearly 28% of Abbotsford residents are immigrants, and approximately 30% of Abbotsford’s residents are under 25 years of age (Census, 2016). Abbotsford is a growing community with a 5.9% increase in its population between 2011 and 2016 (Census, 2016). Interestingly, much of the population growth has been driven by the arrival of new immigrants. From 2011-2016, Abbotsford saw an increase of 12.6% in its immigrant population, more than doubling the 6.2% increase during the 2006-11 period (NewtoBC, 2018). This has been a longstanding trend. In the period from 2001 to 2016, Abbotsford’s immigrant population increased by 41.4% (11,190) substantially outpacing the 16.6% growth in Abbotsford’s Canadian born population over the same period (NewtoBC, 2018). Abbotsford is bordered by the Township of Langley to the west, the Fraser River with a bridge to the District of Mission to the north, and the City of Chilliwack to the east. The municipality’s southern boundary is the Canada–US border (NewtoBC, 2018). Abbotsford includes a large South Asian community of approximately 30,000, which is nearly 26% of the city’s population (Census, 2016). India was the single largest source country for both Abbotsford’s total immigrant (53.4 per cent) and recent immigrant populations (65.1 per cent) (NewtoBC, 2018). The South Asian community first settled in Abbotsford more than 100 years ago. The Gur Sikh Temple on Abbotsford’s South Fraser Way is the oldest in Canada, built between 1908 and 1911, and was declared a national historic site in 2001. Unlike much of the rest of BC, most new immigrants to Abbotsford arrived through Canada’s family sponsorship program (68.3% for its total immigrant population and 62.9% for its recent immigrant population compared to 31.5% and 29.9% for Metro Vancouver; NewtoBC, 2018). Therefore, economic immigrants make up a much smaller portion of Abbotsford’s newcomer population. In 2016, only 24.7% of its total immigrant population and 33.4% of its recent immigrant population arrived under the economic class, which is significantly lower than the regional level in Metro 34 Vancouver (58.2 per cent of total immigrants and 63 per cent of recent immigrants) (NewtoBC, 2018). It is not unusual for large immigrant communities to settle in specific areas or enclaves, but Abbotsford is unique in the homogeneity of its minority population with a clearly dominant South Asian majority. Abbotsford Community Services offers specific programming, including the South Asian Community Resource Office (SACRO), that works to prevent and reduce criminal and gang involvement of South Asian youth by providing outreach, mentorship, and individualized wrap-around programming to youth participants. Table 5. Mother Tongue languages spoken (English + Top 5) in Abbotsford, Census 2016 Periods of intense gang violence have been recorded in Abbotsford, which is policed by the Abbotsford Police Department with 213 police officers (APD, 2017). In 2008, the Abbotsford-Mission Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) was at the center of gang violence and experienced a homicide rate of 4.7 per 100,000 residents, which earned it the distinction of being ‘the murder capital of Canada’ (Bolan, 2009b). In 2009, the Abbotsford-Mission CMA was again dubbed the murder capital of Canada as a result of its homicide rate of 5.2 homicides per 100,000 residents. The Canadian homicide rate was 1.8 per 100,000 (Bolan, 2009b). Just under one-third (29 per cent) of those homicides were thought to be gang-related (Bolan, 2009b). Concerted police responses to issues of gang violence proved effective for a number of years in Abbotsford (Squires & Plecas, 2013; Mangat, 2015).18 However, since 2014, Abbotsford 18 Mangat (2015) concluded that “several prominent organized crime groups, such as the United Nations gang, Red Scorpions, Independent Soldiers, and Hells Angels engaged in a violent ‘turf war’ for control of the British Columbia drug trade, peaking in the escalation of homicides in 2008-09. In response, in 2010, the APD formulated a Gang Suppression Unit and in conjunction with the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU-BC), which was formed in 2004, aggressively targeted organized crime in the Fraser Valley and Lower Mainland, while also implementing strategies to assist in gang prevention and desistance (Hopes, 2012b). As a result, many of the criminal gangs that contributed to the increased rates of homicide in Abbotsford disbanded as members have increasingly been incarcerated or displaced, while several prominent leaders of organized crime groups have been murdered or imprisoned (Mangat, 2015). As such, while violent crime consistently decreased in Abbotsford and British Columbia, law enforcement can be credited, in part, for contributing to these declining rates of homicide after the anomalous increase from 2008 to 2009” (p.14). TOTAL POPULATION ABBOTSFORD 141,397 Mother Tongue English 89,550 Mother Tongue Punjabi 28,050 Mother Tongue German 4,590 Mother Tongue Dutch 1,285 Mother Tongue Spanish 1,175 Mother Tongue French 1,030 35 has seen another increase in gang violence relating to what the APD call the ongoing ‘Townline Hill Conflict’, described as two South Asian youth gangs in conflict with each other (Brown, 2014). The Abbotsford-Mission CMA experienced another spike in gang-related violence in 2017 when it recorded 10 homicides (a rate of 4.72 homicides per 100,000 residents), matching the 2008 homicide numbers. This led to the deployment of the Gang Crime Unit (GCU) in late 2017. The GCU became fully operational in 2018 and is focused on the Abbotsford Police Department’s stated primary goal of suppressing gang violence (APD, 2017). Delta Delta is the smallest of the communities included in this study with a 2016 census population of 102,238. Delta is bordered by water on three sides; the Fraser River to the north, the Georgia Strait to the west connecting it to Richmond via the George Massey Tunnel, and Boundary Bay and the US border to the south. The City of Surrey borders Delta to the east and north. Delta has three geographically distinct urban communities; Ladner, Tsawwassen, and North Delta (Delta, 2017). Nearly 50% of residents live in North Delta. Almost half of the land mass is agricultural, and the ecological conservancy area of Burns Bog makes up almost one-fifth of Delta’s land mass. Of the three cities included in this study, Delta is experiencing the slowest growth in population with an increase of 2.4% since the 2011 census and a prior increase of only 3.3% between 2006 and 2011. In Delta, the three most common languages other than English spoken at home are Punjabi (11.3 per cent), Hindi (1.8 per cent), and Mandarin (1.7 per cent) (see Table 6). Almost 30% of Delta residents are immigrants, with a large South Asian immigrant population (17 per cent) (Delta, 2017). TOTAL POPULATION DELTA 102,238 Mother Tongue English 67,935 Mother Tongue Punjabi 11,795 Mother Tongue Mandarin 3,490 Mother Tongue Cantonese 1,985 Mother Tongue Hindi 1,615 Mother Tongue Tagalog 1,550 Table 6. Mother Tongue languages spoken (English + Top 5) in Delta, Census 2016 36 Delta has its own municipal police force with 190 full time members and 66 civilian employees. Delta Police has a strong history of community engagement and outreach with a police model of ‘no call too small’. Delta is interesting because, despite its close proximity to Surrey, there is a substantially lower rate of violent crime in Delta. Though levels of gang violence in Delta, when compared to Surrey and Abbotsford, are very low, police managers have articulated concern that the gang violence in Surrey may be ‘diffusing’ into Delta (Blumstein, Cohen, Cork, Engberg, & Tita, 2002; Cohen & Tita, 1999). This is not surprising given the retaliatory nature of gang-related violence more generally (Kubrin & Weitzer, 2003). Nonetheless, to date, Delta maintains a crime rate among the lowest in the Lower Mainland. Geographically, demographically, and institutionally distinct, each of the police organizations in these three cities experience differing challenges and strengths related to demography, support for the police department by local political municipal authorities, and differing crime rates. In the course of this research project, I was frequently asked why I chose to include Abbotsford, Surrey, and Delta to the exclusion of the other communities in the Lower Mainland, and without a specific lens to the efforts of the CFSEU-BC. In part, this decision was made because of the homogeneity of these three communities with respect to the representation of the South Asian population as the largest visible minority population in each community. As noted in Chapter Four, which outlines the methodology of this research project, I worked at (but not for) the Abbotsford Police Department from 2008-2013 and, as such, was an outside observer to the efforts of the police to contain and control gang violence in that community which, during that time, saw it named ‘Murder Capital of Canada’ (Bolan, 2009b). Given this, Abbotsford was an obvious choice as the center of my lens of inquiry into this issue. In proposing this research project, after Abbotsford, Surrey was the natural second city for comparative examination given the extensive media attention focused on gang violence in that community, and also given the crossover of gang involved individuals between Abbotsford and Surrey widely reported in media. Post 2009, the levels of violence in Abbotsford fell significantly, while Surrey was experiencing a significant increase in violence. Moreover, in 2009, Surrey developed its own uniformed gang unit, an outward visible expression of its efforts at enforcement and suppression. Having previously conducted research in partnership with the Surrey RCMP, I had the advantage of both a basic understanding of their efforts in responding to gang violence and a likely point of access. Finally, there is no question that Delta is the outlier in 37 the selection of cities for comparative analysis. The crime rate in Delta is notably lower and the number of gang-related murders and attempted murders compared to Surrey and Abbotsford is substantially lower. However, Delta has a similar demography in its dominant majority of South Asian residents among its racialized population. Moreover, Delta borders the City of Surrey sharing Scott Road (also known as 120th street) as the geographic demarcation between the two communities. Broadly speaking, the west side of the road is in Delta bordered to the north by 96th Street and the east side of the road is in Surrey. This is interesting because the communities share a large thoroughfare but reported crime rates differ significantly. As demonstrated by Figure 9, theft of auto statistics for the six-month period from December 24/2018 to June 24/2019 (meaning a vehicle was stolen and excluding situations where items were stolen from a vehicle, which is known as theft from auto) demonstrate that there was a clearly visible difference in the rate of this offence across the two cities. While rates of theft of auto in no way correspond to violent crime rates, which are not available for public crime mapping, Figure 9 illustrates the notable difference in this one category of crime between the two cities. Delta and Abbotsford are both municipal police departments with similarities in officer strength (190 vs 213). Figure 9. Police Reported Theft of Auto (6 months 12/24/2018-06/24/2019). 38 Ultimately, Delta was included as a function of three things; natural curiosity, the fact that I had done previous research work with the Delta Police, and interest piqued by the clearly differing rate of homicide and attempted homicide despite sharing a border with Surrey, as noted in Table 7 that itemizes the number of combined homicides and attempted homicides in each of the three communities included in this research from 2008-2018. Table 7. Confirmed & Suspected Gang Related Homicides and Attempts 2008-2018. CFSEU Data. The decision not to include the CFSEU-BC was simply one of scope. My interest for this dissertation was on the policy responses at the micro level of the police organizations embedded in the communities they serve. The CFSEU-BC is arguably a consideration at the macro-level given that their mandate is the entire province and each of the policing organizations selected for this project annually contribute resources. Quite fortunately, I was able to gain some understanding of the CFSEU-BC’s activities because a significant number of the members interviewed for this project were, at one time, seconded to the CFSEU-BC. Through this inclusion, I was lucky to make contact with the Strategic Research Office at the CFSEU-BC, which very generously provided the original quantitative data for this research and gave permission for me to include many of the images found throughout this dissertation. That said, by no means does this research project purport to ‘know’ about the work of the CFSEU-BC, which remains a very interesting and important future avenue of research. Surrey Abbotsford Delta 2008 14 3 0 2009 19 11 1 2010 15 3 0 2011 12 0 0 2012 15 1 0 2013 10 2 0 2014 0 4 0 2015 23 5 1 2016 15 7 0 2017 8 10 0 2018 9 3 0 Total 140 49 2 39 Context: The Role of Migration During the past 25 years, progressively increasing housing costs in Vancouver proper have pushed settlement out into the suburbs of Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. Peck, Siemiatycki, and Wyly (2014) argued that the resulting affordability crisis engulfed not only low-income and working-class families displaced both socially and spatially from the downtown core, but also large segments of the city’s deeply indebted middle class. Their research revealed that nine-tenths of all net metropolitan population growth in Greater Vancouver between 1971 and 2011 took place in the suburbs, while more than two-thirds of international migrants settled in suburbia (Peck et al., 2014). Ley (2015) demonstrated that, in Vancouver, the detached housing market was unaffordable to most residents. His research highlighted a variety of consequences of this, including heavy debt loads, difficulty in retaining key employees, the rise of illegal suites, and the need to move farther out of the city resulting in long commutes (Ley, 2015). Year over year, suburban communities in the Lower Mainland experience population increases that present challenges for police in those jurisdictions. One key difference between Canada and the US is the density of distribution of public housing that may result in young people not feeling tied to their individual neighbourhoods. Low-density public housing is distributed throughout the Lower Mainland with very few of the public housing ‘projects’ typical of other North American cities. This one difference has resulted in a very different developmental pathway for gangs in the Lower Mainland, a pathway that is fundamentally different from those in other urban centers. On the whole, very little is known about the correlation between migration and participation in gang activity in BC. In fact, there has yet to be localized research to collect immigration characteristics of gang-involved individuals in the Lower Mainland, and police in Canada do not generally collect race-based data. When race-based data is collected, there are stringent policies in place that mire and complicate its public release (Thompson, 2009). The three cities included in this dissertation are similar with respect to the distribution of immigrants within their geographic territories. In 2004, BC Supreme Court of Appeal Justice Wally Oppal, a member of the South Asian community, was interviewed by local media and offered personal observations based on his experiences. Oppal said he agreed with local leaders and officials who maintained that South Asian gang members are often from affluent families. 40 Opal said that “unlike in other countries, people involved in the gang activity here are not the poor or disadvantaged. For the most part, kids involved here are people who come from middle-class and upper-class homes. They get involved for the glamour” (Brown, 2004, para. 26-29). In some areas, the South Asian communities are perceived to be economically prosperous, which is counter to the criminological literature positing that disadvantaged youth and young adults are those at greatest risk to join a gang (Hill, Howell, Hawkins, and Battin-Pearson, 1999; Short, 1985). Police perceptions of the role of ethnicity and existence of non-traditional risk factors for gang activity will be taken up later in the findings in Chapter Five. South Asian Diaspora Frost (2010a) suggested that Punjabi, Punjabi Canadian, Indo-Canadian, South Asian, and East Indian are all labels that circulate in Vancouverites’ common vernacular, some of which are also used by Statistics Canada (p.14). Nayar (2004) criticized the tendency of researchers to consider different communities from the Indian subcontinent all as ‘East Indians’, ‘Indo-Canadians’, or ‘South-Asians’, failing to recognize the vibrant diversity of the disparate communities. Bains (2009) explained the origins noting that terms like East Indian, likely referencing the East India Company that first traded with India and subsequently was the genesis of the British annexation of India. The term ‘Indo-Canadian’ is believed to be the result of Canadian multicultural policy in the 1980’s that espoused that a minority cultural identity could be maintained without impinging on the macro Canadian culture (Bains, 2009). That said, ‘Indo-Canadian’ may imply that the individual benefits from the rights afforded to Canadian citizens. In many cases, this is not true, particularly among first-generation immigrants living with the precarity of permanent resident status (Goldring, Berinstein, & Berhard, 2009; Thompson, Bucerius, Osterberg, & Mitchell, 2017; Villegas, 2015). In Canada, there are significant legal differences between the rights afforded to Canadian citizens and those afforded to permanent residents who can be deported from Canada under section 36 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act as a result of serious criminal convictions, an important distinction when considering the potential fate of gang-involved individuals. To date, there exists a long list of gang-involved individuals that have been ordered deported from BC, including David Revell (HA), Barzan Tilli Choli (UN Gang), Jimi Sandhu (Sandhu Crime Group), Bi Dong (Adam) Lam (UN Gang), and Sophon Sek (Red Scorpions) (Bolan, 2018). 41 Nayar (2012) posited that, in the Lower Mainland, Sikhs raised outside of the Punjab often refer to themselves as ‘Punjabi’ and used the term interchangeably and synonymously with ‘Sikh’. Nayar noted the irony of this, not only because in the Punjab both Hinduism and Sikhism are practiced, but also because upon their arrival in BC as immigrants, Sikhs were frequently called ‘Hindoos’ by Anglo-Canadians (Nayar, 2012). ‘Punjabi’ has now come to be used by Sikhs to refer to themselves, even though there are Hindu Punjabis and Muslim Punjabis living in BC (Nayar, 2012). Bains (2009) suggested that the term ‘South Asian’ was frequently used in academic circles, and though it may include individuals from the broader geography outlined above, the reality of the immigration pattern was fairly homogenous and included immigrants from the Punjab area of India that practice the Sikh religion. In 2004, this diaspora became the largest non-Christian group in Vancouver (Nayar, 2004). There are several examples of members of the South Asian community describing themselves as such. For example, in 2002, Sukhdev Grewal, Manjit Sandhu, Gurdeep Sandhu, Ajit Grewal, and Malkiat Sandhu established the South Asian Family Association (www.safa.ca). The SAFA mission is to promote and enhance family values while embracing Canadian culture and maintaining South Asian culture and identity. In 2005, Gurpreet Sian and Raakhi Sina co-founded the South Asian Arts Society (www.southasianarts.ca) offering Bhangra dance and music classes, professional workshops, guest lectures, and cultural summer camps. In 2006, BC’s first radio station primarily serving the South Asian community went on air (CBC News, 2006). The station’s call letters are RED-FM, which stands for Reflecting Ethnic Diversity. Primarily a Punjabi language station, RED-FM is copyrighted as a registered trademark of the South Asian Broadcasting Corporation and is listed as Vancouver’s Number 1 South Asian Radio Station. Based in Vancouver, the South Asian Post, noted as Canada’s premier English language Indo-Canadian Newspaper (www.southasianpost.com) produces a weekly print edition for the Vancouver area, as well as e-editions for communities across Canada, including Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal. In 2008, the South Asian Post won the prestigious Jack Webster award for Excellence in Journalism for ‘Best Community Reporting’. Another local newspaper, The Patrika (www.patrika.ca) was formerly called The Punjabi Patrika, and is a member in the exclusive club of fewer than 100 truly bilingual newspapers in the world today. The Patrika notes on its website that its founding members, the Sidhu family “have worked tirelessly to establish a stellar reputation in both the 42 Anglo and South Asian communities”. The Patrika is delivered door-to-door in select neighborhoods throughout the Fraser Valley, including in Abbotsford, Delta, and Surrey, and its readers are drawn to the multiculturally adept manner in which the Anglo-Indo newspaper is crafted to the reader’s interests and language. Singh, Waterhouse, and Plecas (2006) demonstrated that the use of the terms ‘Indo-Canadian’ and ‘East Indian’ were common to denote South Asians in BC, but also chose to use the term ‘South Asian’ throughout their work because of Singh’s personal experiences as a member of the community. Their work suggested that South Asian refers to persons whose roots originated from the Northern Punjab region of India, whose native tongue is Punjabi, and whose religion of origin is Sikhism (Singh, Waterhouse, & Plecas, 2006). The term South Asian will be used in keeping with this prior body of work and because it is the term frequently used by locals who self-identify as members of the South Asian diaspora. Though I will use the term South Asian throughout this dissertation, I do so carefully in acknowledging that I do not want to contribute to a pathologizing discourse and recognizing that attempts to describe any group or community using a singular moniker is problematic. South Asian Identity in British Columbia There is a long history of racism towards the South Asian community in BC. Bains (2009) pointed out that South Asians immigrated to Canada in three main waves. Wallace (2009) indicated that, between 1904 and 1907, approximately 5,000 first wave South Asian immigrants arrived in Vancouver, mostly Sikhs from the Punjab region of India. This first wave included men from one state in India, the Punjab, and were mostly farmers with the disposable income to afford the journey and who had some travelling experiences under the British Raj (Bains, 2009). Most men arrived in the first wave to work in response to recruitment efforts of the steamship companies, the lumber industry, and the railways (Bains, 2009). These immigrants faced immediate and directed racism with exclusionists arguing that, like the broader population of Asian immigrants, South Asians were unsuited to Canada’s climate, unassimilable because they accepted a lower standard of living, did not speak English, and were competitors for white labor (Wallace, 2009). Exclusionary policies followed shortly with the Government of Canada passing an order-in-council in January 1908 barring immigrants who had not arrived in Canada by contiguous journey from their country of birth; a policy that 43 excluded South Asians as they were not able to arrive from India to Canada without changing ships in either Hong Kong or Japan (Wallace, 2009). This was known as the Continuous Journey legislation (Bains, 2009). Sikh newcomers already in Canada were denied the right to vote, to be employed in government or public works, to serve on juries or in the military, and were restricted in their access to public facilities and services, housing types, education, and workplace rights (Frost, 2010a). This near-complete isolation resulted in a situation where most British Columbians had almost no contact with South Asians (Indra, 1979 as cited in Frost, 2010a). In addition, the press was used to generate and perpetuate negative stereotypes of South Asians. Media portrayals of South Asians prior to WWI were the most negative accorded to any ethnic or racial group in BC’s history (Indra, 1979 as cited in Frost, 2010a). Wallace (2009) argued that popular notions of South Asians as being a threat focused on: India's colonial status, and the continued association of South Asians with disease, situated popular and official discourse on the ‘Hindu’ issue at the unique crossroads of colonial theory and what Alan Kraut has termed ‘medicalized nativism,’ which occurs when an ethnic group's stigmatic ‘association with disease in the minds of the native-born’ reduces each immigrant from ‘a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one.’ (p.36). Between 1908 and 1914, several pieces of immigration legislation intended specifically to exclude South Asian Immigration were passed.19 When the Komagata Maru arrived on the shores of BC on May 23, 2014 carrying 376 South Asian migrants, it was stopped by Canadian authorities and held in the harbor at Vancouver for nearly two months before being escorted from Canada on July 23, 1914 (Wallace, 2009). The racist and exclusionary treatment of the passengers on board the Komagata Maru continues to command public attention as a reminder of the racism and exclusionary policies that have defined the South Asian experience in Canada (Wallace, 2009). The second wave of South Asian Immigrants to BC from the Punjab began in 1947 with the right to vote and was followed by exclusionary immigration legislation being struck down (Bains, 2009). In the years following this decision, a large number of South Asian Immigrants settled in BC. The third and largest wave of South Asian immigration began in the 1970’s and 19 For an in-depth examination of Orders-in-Council PC 23, PC24 and PC897, see Isabel Wallace’ (2013) KOMÁGÁTA MARU REVISITED:’Hindus’, Hookworm, and the Guise of Public Health Protection. 44 has continued through to the present (Bains, 2009; Frost, 2010). The implementation of family reunification policies and family sponsorship has been heavily used in an effort to keep the traditional family intact (Bains, 2009). The decision to increase annual admission targets combined with the shift towards a ‘points-based’ system of admittance resulted in an increase in the total number of new arrivals to Canada each year (Hiebert, 2000). These shifts also affected the composition of migrant flows, increasing the number of Asian, African, and Latin American arrivals and reducing the proportion of European and American immigrants (Hiebert, 2000). During the 1970’s, political unrest developed in India with Sikh nationalist groups calling for a sovereign Sikh nation-state known as Khalistan. In the early 1980’s, Sikhs were experiencing persecution by Indian police culminating in the 1984 seizure of the Golden Temple in Amritsar under Indian President Indira Ghandi (Buffam, 2014). The event resulted in the death of 492 militia members and 83 military personnel (Nayar, 2004). Many Sikhs fled India resulting in a new wave of migration to Australia, the United Kingdom, and Vancouver Canada (Nayar, 2008). Another defining element of the conflicted South Asian experience in BC was the 1985 Air India Bombing of Flight 182 originating in Vancouver. After luggage containing bombs were checked in Vancouver, the flight departed from Toronto destined for Bombay, India (Frost, 2010a). Over Irish airspace, the bomb exploded, and the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean 90 miles off the coast of Ireland killing all 329 passengers and airline staff, 268 of whom were Canadian citizens. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney phoned the Prime Minister of India to express his condolences. This act has been interpreted as a loss of personal history and theft of Canadian identity as the victims were seen by the Canadian government as Indian, not Canadian (Brethour, 2010). What followed was a 16-year investigation and high-profile criminal trials20 during which the Sikh community in Vancouver became closely associated in the public’s mind with this act of terrorism (Frost, 2010a, p.101). The investigation revealed that the bombing was a retaliatory strike by Sikh Nationalist groups operating in the Lower Mainland against the Indian state for its military seizure of the Golden Temple in Amritsar (Buffam, 2014). In the years that followed, 20 Inderjit Singh Reyat was convicted of manslaughter in 1991 for constructing the bomb, while Ajaib Bagri and Ripudamin Singh Malik were both acquitted of murder in 2003 after the most expensive criminal trial in Canadian history (Buffam, 2018). 45 this violent imagery was reinforced through extensive media coverage of gurdwara based conflicts21 between Sikh moderates and fundamentalists in the Lower Mainland (Frost, 2010a). An examination of the history of South Asian gangs in BC reveals that such groups were traditionally considered opportunistic low-level drug dealers operating in loosely structured groups, often formed within the family and comprised of brothers and cousins (Skelton, Culbert, & Lavoie, 2004; Tyakoff, 2003). More recently, law enforcement agencies across BC have come to acknowledge the ability of these groups to organize and control the drug trade, including distribution, trafficking, and transporting drugs across the American border (RCMP, 2006). In June 2005, the Criminal Analysis Section of the ‘E’ Division RCMP released an organized crime report that identified 108 active organized crime groups in BC. South Asian organized crime was identified in the top five most significant categories of organized crime in BC (Sangha, 2018). Also, in 2005, RCMP Sergeant Wayne Rideout stated that South Asian gangs were engaged in more low-level street dealing activity than other organized crime networks and were more likely to perpetrate spontaneous and brazen violence, often triggered by pride and bravado (Bolan, 2005a; 2005b). Between 2007 and 2009, the VPD reported that the Buttar-Malli and Sanghera South Asian crime groups were responsible for over 100 shootings in attempts to kill each other for profit and control over territory (VPD, 2009). Public Safety Canada (2011) noted that the South Asian community in Abbotsford identified concerns that their youth were becoming disproportionately involved in gang activity noting that anecdotal accounts highlighted issues of intra-family conflict, generational issues, and issues related to social maladjustment resulting in violence. Sumartojo (2012) posited that after more than 25 years of violence and the deaths of over 100 young South Asian young men, it is clear that the Lower Mainland continues to face a very real issue of gang violence in the South Asian community. Pabla (2019) suggested that number has now risen to more than 200 deaths of gang-related deaths of South Asian men in the Lower Mainland. Frost (2010a) interviewed 30 South Asian high school students living in Surrey (15 males and 15 females) to examine how these young people developed and articulated a sense of 21 On April 20, 1998, the Sikh religious governing body in Amritsar, India passed an edict against the use of tables and chairs in Gurdwaras. Conflict erupted following the Surrey-Delta gurdwara’s opposition to and failure to accept this decision. The issue of tables and chairs was heavily reported by local mainstream media in the Lower Mainland (Frost, 2010a). 46 identity in the context of their parents’ status as immigrants. She reasoned that it was the common experience of young people to contend with the competing influences and demands of parents, siblings, teachers, peers, and the popular media in identity formation and the development of an understanding of how and where they fit as individuals within the wider society. Frost concluded that: For the thousands of children born into immigrant households, this process of identity construction is made more complex by family histories, continuing attachments to the ‘homeland,’ questions of race and ethnicity, and their position within and between cultures. In addition to confronting the fundamental question faced by all youth, ‘Who am I?’ the children of immigrants must ask specifically ‘Who am I ethnically?’ and ‘Who am I racially?’ (2010b, p.229). Frost (2010b) further posited that the young Punjabi men in her study were also led to questions of identity that moved beyond those typically experienced by non-ethnic youth, including ‘What kind of man am I?’ She concluded by suggesting that, for her participants, their understandings of race/ethnicity were simultaneously intertwined with notions of masculinity and the two categories, at times, reinforced, complicated, and clarified one another within the individuals’ identity formation. Moreover, she emphasized the particular significance of negative mainstream depictions of young men similar to them as involved in gang violence. She highlighted that her participants noted feeling discriminated against when reading these press portrayals. These concerns about identity formation were often repeated in popular media citing bravado and honor as traits of South Asian culture leading to violence (Sangha, 2018; Tyakoff, 2003). History of South Asian Gangs in BC Since the emergence of concerns related to gangs in the Lower Mainland, there have been concordant concerns expressed both from within and outside the South Asian community about the overrepresentation of young South Asian men both as perpetrators and victims of gang violence (Chan & Grindlay, 2018; Mall, 2018a; Mall, 2018b). Bhatt and Tweed (2018) estimated that between 2006 and 2014, slightly more than one in every five gang-related homicides in BC involved South Asians, leading to sustained media attention focused on the South Asian diaspora. In 2018, a citizen’s rally in Surrey brought more than 1,000 community members out to city hall. The event was a coordinated effort by South Asian community activists and citizens called “Wake Up”, was a media spectacle intended to garner the attention of police and policymakers (Pabla, 2019). In each of the communities of Surrey, Delta, and Abbotsford, the 47 South Asian population is the dominant majority among the visible minority populations (see Table 8). Table 8. Top 3 Visible Minority Populations in each city, by numbers. Census 2016 The admittedly broad term ‘South-Asian’ includes the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Tibet (Bains, 2009). Contextually, the term South Asian in the Lower Mainland is widely used to describe what both Bains (2009) and Frost (2010b) argued is actually quite a specific group: namely immigrants from the Punjab region of India that predominantly practice the Sikh religion. Klassen and Georgiou (2008) also defined South Asian as Punjabi and Sikh diaspora/communities in the context of Western Canada. The South Asian community in British Columbia is widely centred in the three communities examined in this research. Though the South Asian community represents only 8% of the population of BC, Surrey, Abbotsford and Delta are home to large South Asian communities comprising 32%, 25%, and 22% of the population, respectively (see Table 9). Table 9. Population Statistics, 2016 Census In 2009, more than 96% of South Asians in the Abbotsford area had origins in the province of Punjab, making Punjabi their mother tongue, Sikhism their primary faith, and SURREY - TOTAL VISIBLE MINORITY POPULATION 299,245 SOUTH ASIAN 56% 168,040 CHINESE 13% 39,890 FILIPINO 11% 31,865 DELTA –TOTAL VISIBLE MINORITY POPULATION 36,600 SOUTH ASIAN 56% 20,485 CHINESE 21% 7,685 FILIPINO 7% 2,655 ABBOTSFORD- TOTAL VISIBLE MINORITY POPULATION 91,920 SOUTH ASIAN 38% 35,310 CHINESE 3% 2,290 FILIPINO 2% 1,570 JURISDICTION POPULATION SOUTH ASIAN % OF POPULATION BC 4,648,055 365,705 8% Surrey 517,887 168,040 32% Abbotsford 141,397 35,310 25% Delta 102,238 20,845 22% 48 Punjabi their dominant culture (Bains, 2009). In the 2016 census, 35,310 individuals in Abbotsford reported being of South Asian heritage, representing about 25% of the city’s population. Though the population of Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Ismaili South Asians in Abbotsford is growing, the absence of 2016 census data on religion has resulted in a gap in our understanding of this trend. Concerns about South Asian gang violence date back to the early 1990s but garnered substantial media attention with the 1998 death of Bindy Johal. He was the “penultimate hero in South Asian gang lore” (Singh et al., 2006, p.13). He and rival Ron Dosanjh held a very public television dispute in which Dosanjh threated to ‘put a bullet’ between Johal’s eyes. However, he never got the chance as he was shot and killed while driving down Kingsway Avenue in Burnaby, BC. Bindy Johal and four co-accused were tried and acquitted for the murder; one of the jurors, Gillian Guess, was later convicted of obstruction of justice for having an affair with Peter Gill, one of Johal’s co-accused (Cunningham, 1999). Johal was later gunned down ‘execution style’ at the Palladium night club. Though there were more than 300 people in the nightclub at the time of his murder, this homicide was never solved. His reputation as the most notorious South Asian gang member continues to extend far beyond the borders of BC (Singh et al., 2006). Frost (2010) recalled that, in 1991, a young Indo-Canadian man named Parminder Chana was murdered allegedly because he was dating the sister of known gangster Rajinder ‘Little’ Benji. Sanjay Narain, who witnessed the murder, was reportedly thrown from the Cleveland Dam in North Vancouver for gossiping about what he saw (Frost, 2010). By 2003, it is estimated that the lives of more than 60 young South Asian men have been taken in violent gang-related conflict by being beaten to death, shot, stabbed, burned, or strangled. In 2006, several sources reported that more than 100 young South Asian males had been killed across BC, primarily in the Lower Mainland, as a result of gang and criminal activity (RCMP, 2006; Smyth, 2006). Police and the press portrayed these deaths as the result of an ongoing Indo-Canadian ‘gang war’ (Frost, 2010). According to Sangha (2018), of police and media reports of gang-affiliated South Asians in the Lower Mainland, the vast majority have Sikh ancestry and names that originated in the Punjabi region of India. Renisa Mawani, a University of BC sociology professor, argued that 49 “there is really a dominant discourse or understanding among people in Vancouver that we do have an ethnicized crime problem, and that the ethnicized crime problem has largely to do with South Asian and Asian gangs” (Bridge & Fowlie, 2006, p. 1). Throughout the past 20 years, those media depictions have offered explicit racialization of the issue (Mirchandani & Chan, 2002; Olstead, 2002). Examples of racialized media headlines include: The roots of gang warfare: BC’s Sikhs must look hard at themselves. -Renu Bakshi, December 23, 2002, Maclean’s East Indian gang deaths: 60 in 6 years: Kidnappings linked to same groups have doubled since '99, head of gang task force says -Kim Bolan, December 3, 2005, The Vancouver Sun Some gangsters beyond hope, officer says: Those young Indo-Canadians are a lost generation, Insp. Kash Heed says -Kim Bolan, October 27, 2005, The Vancouver Sun 'This is a cancer in our society': Attorney-General Wally Oppal calls on Indo-Canadian lawyers to tackle gang problem – Kim Bolan November 21, 2005, The Vancouver Sun Gang violence blamed on parents, culture, racism: 100 South Asian youths killed in BC during last 20 years -Lena Sin, April 12, 2006, The Province Blame and shame: The South Asian community has to find the courage and wisdom to deal with problems that darken the doorsteps of all households -Shachi Kurl, November 10, 2006, The Vancouver Sun South Asians targeted with new police outpost; Aim is to get people living in area involved in local issues -Katie Mercer, July 7, 2008, The Province Two bodies found in Abbotsford; Young Indo-Canadian males discovered slain in car; link to Thursday kidnapping investigated -Kim Bolan, May 2, 2009, The Vancouver Sun Sikhs hold anti-gang summit; Temple representatives discuss solutions to ongoing violence -Larissa Cahute, June 27, 2013, The Province Respecting the House Rules; Ujjal Dosanjh is among many calling for new immigrants to be educated in Canadian values to help curb attitudes that have led to tragedies like Ravinder Bhangu's brutal murder -Jon Ferry, October 17, 2013, The Province They carry guns in South Asian gangster rap videos. In real life, many haven’t touched one -Sonia Deol & Jesse Ferreras, January 30, 2018, Global News Pardip Brar is SIXTH South Asian to die in the past eight months in Lower Mainland Gang Conflict. -Rattan Mall, Indo-Canadian Voice, March 10, 2018a. 19-year-old male killed in Abbotsford is 16th South Asian to be murdered in the Lower Mainland this year. -Rattan Mall, Indo-Canadian Voice. November 12, 2018b. Bhangra promoter Ranjeev Sangha who was shot dead outside his home was ‘associated to drug activity’. -Rattan Mall, Indo-Canadian Voice. November 30, 2018c. 50 These headlines and media commentaries illustrate the ways in which the public and media discourse around gang-related violence in the Lower Mainland has sometimes been explicitly racialized in its focus on South Asian men and boys. Popular media outlets have repeatedly named several well-known gang-entrenched South Asian men. These include the Dosanjh brothers (Ron and Jimmy), the Duhre brothers (Sandip, Balraj, and Paul), the Buttar brothers (Manjit, Bal, and Kelly), the Dhak brothers (Gurmit and Sukhveer), and the Sanghera crime family (Bolan, 2018b; May 2014; VPD, 2010). Representations of young South Asian men as gangsters have crossed over into popular culture. In 2007, Ranj Dhaliwal published the novel Daaku which, in Punjabi, means outlaw. This novel is said to reflect the “violent and ruthless world of Indo-Canadian gangs” promoted as a “bullet-riddled grand tour of Indo-Canadian gangland” (Frost, 2010a, p.109.) The author was a volunteer with anti-violence programs in the Indo-Canadian community and indicated that the book was based on his knowledge of and experiences with the Indo-Canadian underworld having grown up in Surrey, BC. In 2009, Warrior Boyz, a National Film Board of Canada documentary, was released depicting three young Indo-Canadian men, one of whom was an ex-convict, former gang member, and high school dropout (Frost, 2010a). Frost (2010a) suggested that this film recounted the pressure to earn peer approval and respect faced by young South Asian men and highlighted the important role of educators and families in combatting risks for gang membership. Shortly after Warrior Boyz was released, the film A Warrior’s Religion, directed by Mani Amar, was released that featured interview footage with prominent figures and leaders in Vancouver’s South Asian community, along with local media personalities (Frost, 2010a). These interviews were seen as an effort to demonstrate the scope of the problem while working to make sense of the violence (Frost, 2010a). A number of scholarly studies have examined racism and bias in Canadian mass media representations of racialized immigrant groups, with specific attention to the depictions of these groups as threats to public safety (Bradimore & Bauder, 2011; Dunn & Mahtani, 2001; Henry & Tator, 2005; Hier & Greenberg, 2002; Jiwani, 2005). This body of work has deconstructed the complicit role of Canadian popular news media in processes of stigmatization and racialization (Greenberg, 2000; Sumartojo, 2012). As Jiwani (2006) argued, “in representing race, the news media racialize particular groups of people, demarcating them as different from the majority and 51 imputing qualities that emphasize their difference, and then, by inferiorizing, trivializing, and exoticizing these qualities, ultimately render such differences deviant” (p. 40). In Canadian news media, very seldom is there a headline that says, ‘Caucasian gangster killed’, and thus, the explicit identification of race must be acknowledged as inequitable, if not problematic.22 Portrayals in popular media that racialize certain types of crime have the potential to distort public attitudes in problematic ways, including the perceptions and attitudes of those who work in the criminal justice system, notably the police. Wortley and McCalla (2008) encouraged consideration of the bias model in which specific immigrant or ethnic minority groups may be over-represented because they are more likely to come under intense police surveillance, more likely to be arrested by the police, and more likely to be convicted by the courts. It is important to remain cognizant of these potential biases in our understanding of this issue. One of the contributions of this research to the literature lies in the data indicating the racial distribution of homicide and attempted homicide obtained for this project from the CFSEU-BC. As noted by Thompson and Gartner (2014), this type of data is, by and large, not available because the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics “does not publish or provide data on the racial or ethnic origins of victims or offenders” (p.92). 22 For a rich understanding of the layered representation of Sikhs in Canadian media, see Harminder Kang’s unpublished SFU Masters Thesis: ‘A Post-Colonial Vaisakhi Reading: Unveiling the Indo Canadian Sikh Identity through Canadian Media’. Figure 10. Ethnicity of Victims of Gang Related Victims of Homicide & Attempts in BC 2006-18 (CFSEU Data). 52 The dataset obtained for this research project from the CFSEU-BC includes the ethnic origin of victims in all known gang-related homicides and attempted homicides from 2006-2018 across BC, the victims were Caucasian 39.8% of the time, South Asian in 25.5% of incidents, and Asian in 19.1% of known incidents (see Figure 10).23 South Asians represent approximately 8% of the population of BC, but about 25% of victims of gang homicides and attempts. Given this, the overrepresentation of South Asian victims in BC homicide data is clear. Moreover, when considering the overrepresentation of young South Asian men as victims of gang violence in the three jurisdictions included in this research, the data is more compelling. In Surrey, South Asians represent 32% of the population, but 51% of victims of gang-related homicide attempts between 2006-2018 victimized South Asians. This pattern of disproportionate representation in lethal and sub-lethal violent victimization statistics is mirrored in Abbotsford where South Asians represent 25% of the population, but 82% of victims of gang-related homicide attempts in that community were South Asian. Delta is the outlier with no homicide attempts during the 12 years included in the data. These statistics indicate that young South Asian men are disproportionately overrepresented as victims (see Figure 11). Figure 11. Ethnicity of victims of gang-related homicide attempts by jurisdiction 2006-2018 (CFSEU Data). 23 In this data, the low levels of violence directed towards Indigenous people is interesting. This may be yet another way that gang violence in the lower mainland is qualitatively different from lethal violence data in other parts of Canada. 53 South Asians represent 32% of the population in Surrey, but 39% of gang-related homicide victims from 2006-2018 were South Asian. In Abbotsford, where South Asians represent 25% of the population, 44% of victims of gang homicide were of South Asian descent. Again, Delta is the outlier, with only two gang-related homicides during the 12-year period from 2006-2018. These smaller numbers notwithstanding, it is important to note that although South Asians represent only 22% of the population of Delta, both of the homicide victims in Delta (100 per cent) were South Asians. Figure 12. Ethnicity of victims of gang-related homicides by jurisdictions 2006-2018 (CFSEU Data). Research and Responses In November 2005, the Federal Department of Canadian Heritage commissioned a committee of ten volunteers from across the South Asian community to develop an action plan to combat ‘rampant Indo-Canadian gang violence’ (Bolan, 2005a). The government of Canada called this task force the “Group of 10 Project” because the committee was comprised of ten South Asians selected from around the lower mainland. Then-federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh and Multiculturalism Minister Raymond Chan introduced the committee. Chan stated that the committee was formed to tackle the “disproportionate number of violent slayings linked to drugs and gangs in the Indo-Canadian community” (Bolan, 2005a). Dosanjh said that the committee was tasked with forming an integrated response to the “debilitating problem where 241223815Surrey Abbotsford DeltaSouth Asian Other39% of Victims South Asian44% of Victims South Asian100% of Victims South Asian 54 you see young men dropping like flies” (Bolan, 2005a). The final report of the committee was titled Community Response to South Asian Youth Violence, and outlined a number of issues challenging the South Asian community and youth at risk of becoming involved in criminal or gang activity, and established four primary factors that they believed contributed to a youth’s decision to lead a criminal lifestyle. These factors were: (1) historical and current contextual factors; (2) family, schools, and community life; (3) cultural beliefs and values; and (4) the role of media. Each factor included several pre-conditions and conditions covering a wide range of issues, including accessibility to crime and drugs, class/status structure within the community, lack of parental involvement in schools and the education system, learning that violence was acceptable, an overemphasis on the importance of financial success, and the lack of positive role models. Frost (2010a) suggested that the negative media portrayals that resulted from a focus on this report may have operated as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that led to further violence as young South Asian men attempted to live up to their ‘gangster’ image. The report has been criticized for its lack of empirical data and was premised on personal belief and anecdotal information acquired by committee members. Though limited in the absence of empirical evidence, many of the factors included in the report were well-supported risk factors for youth offending. However, distribution of the report was limited, and it has been seldom referenced, which is perhaps not surprising given its anecdotal nature. The report recommended the creation of South Asian Youth and Family Integration Strategy (SAYF) to be operated under an advisory board comprised of 8-10 members of the South Asian community, as well as representatives from all three levels of government, the objective of which was to “facilitate, coordinate, and monitor the community response to South Asian youth violence” (Besla et al., 2005, p.13). Beyond this recommendation, the report also focused on education concluding that “anecdotal evidence suggests that many South Asian children fall behind expected learning levels at early ages in terms of numeracy skills and literacy, and that many youth who engage in violence experienced academic difficulties in school” (Besla et al., 2005, p. 4). Finally, the Group of 10 recommended that a parenting program be implemented in the South Asian community in which parents could learn about “critical relationship issues in the family, such as the importance of health attachment, the stages of development that children go through, and the need to have open communication with children about their needs and goals” (Besla et al., 2015, p.23). 55 In recent years, several significant research projects have focused on the perceived successes of South Asian students in the Lower Mainland. Frost (2010a) argued that educational attainment was an important indicator of success and, for certain young men who were unable or unmotivated to attend college or university, the gang or criminal lifestyle may be appealing in that it represented an alternative mobility strategy and a means for earning the community’s respect. Sayani (2010) also focused on the educational experiences of South Asian boys in the BC Public Education System noting that the negative school experiences were influenced, to some degree, by socio-cultural factors, namely the privileged treatment of the male children and the unconditional safety net provided for all the male children to enter into the family business (where applicable). In examining the privilege of young South Asian boys, who called themselves “brown boys”, Sayani stated that: Throughout their childhood, these boys received whatever they wanted; material goods and money, as the boys saw it, came easy to them. The family business was the source of it; for the boys, the business would continue satisfying all their needs. According to the Brown boys, the privilege that they had experienced since they were born would only continue once they joined the family business. In the meantime, school had to be endured as painlessly as possible (2010, p.271). The lens of privilege, wherein young men were offered everything and not required to work, often created a vicious circle (Sayani, 2010). The parents believed that they were safeguarding their sons’ futures by providing a stress-free environment that allowed them to better focus on their studies, but some of the boys used the perceived safety net as an excuse to renege on their school responsibilities. As they performed poorly in school, their behavior was positively reinforced with additional incentives and the cycle continued (Sayani, 2010). Sharif (2010) argued that “the storyline behind this reason of the Brown boys’ privilege is quite clear: From birth, they are coddled, with every need or whim of theirs addressed dotingly” (Sharif, 2010, p.264). Sayani’s (2010) research linked the economic privilege of young South Asian men with the economic success of the family business which, as sons, they were set to inherit. Sayani argued that: Joining the family business—which, in this study was always characterized as a labourer’s business—was for my interviewees a compelling reason attributed to the Brown boys’ lack of motivation and success in school. Almost invariably, this notion of joining the family business was shared with me by my interviewees as a fact rather than a hypothesis or theory. Very rarely were any of my interviewees critical or self-reflexive, indicating to me that their thoughts were definitive and not speculative. The idea they tried to convey was simple: The Brown boys did not have to 56 worry about working hard or succeeding in school because they knew, very well, that they would always have a job, and thus an income, in their dad’s or family’s business (2010, p.271). The success of many young South Asian men was precisely because their family businesses had benefitted from the support of the ethnic community to become independent entrepreneurs or to start family run businesses (Walton-Roberts & Hiebert, 1997). Sayani (2010) suggested that the unwillingness of her participants to endure the racism they perceived their parents and family members experienced resulted in increased efforts to attain social power in schools. In attempts to achieve this power, they would employ brute strength, mobilizing fear and intimidation, and often enacting rituals of intimidation and aggression in violation of school rules to increase their social and symbolic power among peers. In deconstructing this behavior, Sayani (2010) noted that it was easier to live up to the pre-existing image of young South Asian men as violent thugs than it was to change it. These overt performances of masculinity are commonplace among young men including those not involved in the gang lifestyle, but, as Sayani (2010) suggested, there were frequently institutional consequences for the young South Asian men who engaged in these behaviours including suspension or expulsion from school. Frost (2010a) recounted that there were many participants in her study who had the opportunity to go to college or university, but ‘gravitated to the lifestyle’ because it is an ‘easy’ way to meet the community’s expectations. These reputational factors are laden with performances of masculinity. Shariff (2010) argued that differences in parental expectations for South Asian sons and daughters regarding appropriate cultural behaviours was well documented in the existing literature and posited that second-generation South Asians continued to experience acculturation challenges and family adaptation difficulties that may be attributed to the heightened potential for differential cultural orientations when youth were raised in Canada and parents were foreign born (Shariff, 2010). In Shariff’s (2010) research, perceptions of preferential treatment toward boys was particularly disturbing to the girls who reasoned that, instead of encouraging and reinforcing the girls for their accomplishments, it was the boys who received from their parents the gifts, praise, and job offers to the family business. Shariff (2010), Sayani (2010), and Frost (2010a) all documented the challenges faced by young people challenged to develop an identity and find acceptance living in the lower mainland which has a long history of racism towards the South Asian community. Bridge and Fowlie 57 (2006) contended that this racism is not just historical, but also ongoing. In an Ipsos-Reid poll in 2006 asking Canadian residents “which ethnic group do you think is most responsible for crimes being committed in your city?”, roughly 65% of Vancouver respondents attributed crime to a specific group, and 56% identified that group as ‘East Indians/Indo-Canadians’ (Bridge & Fowlie, 2006). In 2018, the Environics Institute partnered with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation to update its polling on Canadian attitudes about immigration and towards multiculturalism. Their survey of 2000 Canadians aged 18 years old and older was conducted in February 2018 and found that Canadians remain more positive than negative about current levels of immigrants but concerns about integration into Canadian society remained the most contentious aspect of immigration and refugee issues in Canada. Environics (2018) demonstrated that, in Vancouver, where there is a large South Asian population, views about the frequency of discrimination have increased over the past three years, and is now at the national average with 27% of respondent saying such discrimination happens ‘often’, with another 46% saying ‘sometimes’ (p.3). In effect, racism towards the South Asian community in Vancouver persists, and media depictions stigmatize and stereotype the South Asian community in BC. The Violence Persists Despite the media and police attention focused on gang violence in the South Asian community, the violence persists. In January 2015, once well-known local basketball star, Arundeep Cheema, was shot to death in a vehicle outside the home of a known associate in North Delta (Bolan, 2016a). The following weeks saw a rash of shootings throughout the Lower Mainland. In April 2015, Arun Bains, nephew of Surrey MLA Harry Bains, was killed in his vehicle in a gangland-style shooting (Smyth, 2015). At the time of his death, there had been 23 gang-related shootings in Surrey in the previous six weeks (Smyth, 2015). CFSEU-BC Sergeant Lindsay Houghton publicly stated that the culture of silence in the community and the “culture of enablement” by parents was unhelpful. “We need parents to help break up this cycle”, he noted at a community forum where over 800 pamphlets in English, Punjabi, and Chinese were distributed to community members (Smyth, 2015). Sharif (2010) argued that members of the South Asian community interpreted their communities’ collective silence as sanctioning the gangster lifestyle and subculture. Frost (2010a) explored this perceived complicity in her work characterizing the culture of silence as 58 starting at home. She recounted that several of her respondents indicated parents’ complicit behavior as problematic, with one respondent describing a father being given a Mercedes by his son who worked at a gas station. After he was shot and killed, the father was reported to have said in the news “I didn’t know anything was wrong” (Sharif, 2010, p.207). In April 2016, Surrey’s Mayor Linda Hepner announced in a news conference held jointly with RCMP Superintendent Shawn Gill that “the vast majority of both the perpetrators and targets of the shootings have been young males of South Asian descent” (Proctor & Johnston, 2016). In the following months, Mayor Hepner was heavily criticized for publicly and categorically stating that the gang and drug problem was a South Asian community problem and not Surrey’s problem (Johnston, 2016). Such sentiments were nothing new; the ‘racialization of crime’ and the subsequent ‘criminalization of race’ in the mass media and public imagination is a well-known criminological fact that can have very significant and negative consequences for the affected communities.24 Turning to media accounts, former Abbotsford Police Chief Bob Rich noted that the ongoing conflict in Abbotsford involved two groups with about 40 men fighting over drug lines. The 40 men were predominantly from the South Asian community (Hopes, 2015a). Three of the men, Sandeep Sidhu, Jimi Sandhu, and Gavin Grewal, were the subject of a police issued public notice in March 2015 warning that the men posed a risk of “significant harm to the safety of the community and anyone who may associate with them” (Hopes, 2015a). Gavin Grewal was arrested in June 2016 and charged with murder (Hopes, 2016). He never went to trial because in December 2018, he was murdered in his North Vancouver apartment (Bolan, 2018b). Jimi Sandhu was deported from Canada for serious criminality (Bolan, 2018b). In 2018, he was arrested by authorities in India for his involvement in a narcotics operation there (Hopes, 2018). This rivalry, known as the ‘Townline Hill Conflict’, remains ongoing as of 2020. The disputes have led to an increase in brazen shootings in public spaces in Surrey and Abbotsford, prompting high levels of fear over the perception that innocent bystanders may be affected by this violence (Bolan, 2015). These fears were exacerbated in September 2015, when 74-year-old Ping Shu Ao was shot and killed while standing in his driveway in the Townline Hill area of 24 For a continued discussion of these issues, see Henry & Tator, 2005, Jiwani, 2006, and Mirchandani & Chan, 2002. 59 Abbotsford, the victim of a drive-by shooting bullet gone astray (Hopes, 2015a). The death of innocent bystanders creates enormous pressure on the police to be seen to be doing something in response to perceived spikes in gang violence. Ongoing media attention highlighting gang violence in the Lower Mainland maintains its presence on the agenda as a persistent presence as a serious policy issue. In the campaign leading to the October 2019 federal election, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh visited Surrey and pledged, if elected, to commit $100 million dollars, saying, All the experts I’ve met with have said we need to invest directly in youth…. we want to massively inject funding specifically into youth-targeted programs at the federal level, give them funding so they can run those programs with more access to resources.25 A Path Forward An important policy question is whether Indo-Canadian gangs require a specialized response. In an effort to address the issues in Surrey, the Department of Canadian Heritage commissioned a study that emphasized the need for improved parental guidance and inter-generational relations specific to the South Asian Community in the Lower Mainland (Tyakoff, 2003). To that end, the perceived solution of South Asian gang violence was seen to require families to cooperate in the identification of criminals and to engage the community in actively preventing and addressing the root causes of gang violence. It is clear that the uptake of gang violence among South Asian youth defies simple explanation or easily implemented policy. Sumartojo (2012) cautioned that: As is often noted in discussions of ethnocultural groups, the use of the term ‘community’ to describe Indo-Canadians in Vancouver can be argued to mask the social, religious and linguistic differences within this group, while at the same time strengthening discourses about the perceived ‘closed’ nature of Indo-Canadians to ‘external’ institutions, particularly the police (p.2). This is an essential point of departure because much of the discourse that surrounded media depictions of South Asian gang violence in the Lower Mainland either tacitly or explicitly suggested community responsibility for the problem. Buffam (2018) asserted that “the Indo-Canadian home has become an axis of legal scrutiny and public judgment in the local public 25 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ndp-singh-gang-violence-youth-1.5301973 60 sphere, attending to the practices of speculation and surveillance that have transformed this domestic realm into a locus of racial fantasy, desire, and political action” (p.154). For nearly 25 years, popular media depictions of South Asians included suggestions of this particular community as plagued by violence. Sumartojo (2012) argued that the most significant concern for many within the community was not necessarily perceptions of the growth of organized criminal gangs, per se, but the popularity of the gangster image and the apparent glamorization of violence among young Indo-Canadian men. It is important to acknowledge the undeniable socioeconomic success of many individuals in the Lower Mainland’s South Asian community. A 2001 Statistics Canada report titled The South Asian Community in Canada concluded that South Asian youth and young adults were more likely to attend high school and obtain post-secondary education than their peers (Lindsay, 2001). Furthermore, Canadian adults of South Asian origin were more likely to have a university degree and twice as likely to have a post-graduate degree than the rest of the Canadian population (Lindsay, 2001). Without question, the South Asian community in BC has, in many respects, achieved considerable success and upward social mobility. Yet, there remains a concerning over-representation of young South Asian men as victims of gang violence that requires police and policy attention. While not the specific focus of this dissertation, acknowledging the media and police attention focused on South Asian gangs in BC creates questions about whether there is a need for a specifically South Asian focused response to gangs. I have cautiously approached this issue given its focus on race and culture and recognizing that my outsider lens is limited as I am not a member of the South Asian community. I recognize that, in part, focusing on the concerns around South Asian gangs is perhaps contributing to the very problem I analyze here. That said, in the years it took to write this dissertation, and in lengthy conversations with knowledgeable colleagues, it also did not seem acceptable to shy away from this topic. I have attempted to offer a balanced lens and wholly recognize that some may take issue with my efforts here. This was written in an attempt to provide a local context and offer critical reflection on the data that indicates there is a clear overrepresentation of young South Asian men as victims of gang-involved violence in BC’s Lower Mainland. Given the dominant South Asian residents as members of the racialized population in each of the three communities in this study, and the correspondingly small population of Asian residents in each of these communities, this dissertation examined police 61 responses to gangs broadly, and examining South Asian gangs specifically as a result of their overrepresentation as victims of gang violence. That said, there exists a need for research to specifically examine the concordant concerns related to the overrepresentation of young Asian men, as the data obtained for this dissertation from the CFSEU-BC suggested that they too are experiencing discordant representation among victims of violence when considering the total population in BC. However, this was not a focus of research in this dissertation because of the small Asian populations in the three communities that are the focus of this research. This chapter sought to provide an overview of the context in which gang violence rose to prominence on the policy agenda. Unlike many typical public policy issues, among the primary policy actors responsible for the development and implementation of policy instruments related to prevention, intervention, and suppression of gang violence are the police of jurisdiction. Plagued by definitional issues, police across Canada have been left to make recommendations and programming decisions in the absence of a solid evidence base. There have been persistent calls for more evidence-based policing, but this remains a significant challenge given the dearth of rigorous research in policing. This dissertation seeks to contribute empirical data to the body of scholarly research on gangs by providing a lens into the perceptions of the police, to increase our understanding of their understanding. This is important because, by default, the police have been tasked with program development and implementation. 62 Chapter 2. Defining Gangs This chapter seeks to accomplish three goals. First, it will provide a broad overview of the definitional issues plaguing sociological and criminological research on the phenomenon of gangs. Scholarly efforts to define gangs will be considered followed by the challenges presented for police in their efforts to define gangs. The chapter will conclude recognizing the need for an evidence base upon which policy and programs can be built. Ground Zero - Chicago Academic research focusing on gangs began nearly 100 years ago with Frederick Thrasher’s seminal research on more than 11,300 gangs in Chicago, widely considered to be the first sociological study of gangs. According to Thrasher (1927), No two gangs are just alike… This fact of individuality must be recognized by both the student who attempts to classify it as a form of collective behaviour, and by the social worker who deals with it as a practical problem (p.45). He posited that gangs formed spontaneously but required planning and frequent face-to-face relations to develop (Thrasher, 1927). Thrasher argued that gangs moved “through space as a unit” and eventually met some hostile element that precipitated conflict (p.58). Conflict, in turn, helped integrate the group. His work accounted for a natural evolution of gangs from diffuse playgroups to solidified criminal organizations, the original presentation of the continuum of gangs. Thrasher concluded that differences in personnel, experience, and tradition combined with the physical and social environment to give every gang a different and particular character (Lavorgna, Lombardo, & Sergi, 2013). His observations remain true nearly a century later as researchers, policymakers, and police officers remain unable to succinctly characterize the notion of a gang. This lack of definition has created real and sustained challenges in the ongoing effort to conduct research on gangs. Scholarly Efforts to Define Gangs A pervasive theme within the literature is that there continues to be lack of consensus on what constitutes a gang (Alleyne & Wood, 2010). There has been an enormous effort among academics and police to settle upon a universal definition with little success (Esbensen, Winfree He, & Taylor, 2001; Matsuda, Esbensen, & Carson, 2012; Petersen, 2000; Wortley, 2010). Gang researchers have long lamented that this lack of consensus has led to overestimations, 63 underestimations, and depictions of gangs that may not be comparable or particularly useful (Klein & Maxson, 2006). Kennedy dismissed the academic debates on definitions of gangs more than a decade ago stating that, the experts can’t even agree on what a gang is, can’t predict why one kid will join when another won’t, can’t predict why one gang member will kill and the others won’t, can’t say why one neighbourhood has an open drug market and others like it don’t (2011, p. 214). Ezeonu (2014) maintained that academics and police departments continue to disagree on what constitutes a gang and conceptualize the gang phenomenon quite differently. Esbensen et al. (2001) noted that a consensus on the definition is necessary for researchers to be able to replicate, assess, and expand research findings. While the definition of a gang has been the subject of much discussion by academic gang researchers, a shared understanding remains elusive because there are so many competing stakeholders vested in this serious social issue (Alleyne & Wood, 2010; Spindler & Bouchard, 2011). These include academics, policymakers, politicians, and the media, all of whom operate using different definitions generally tailored to their local experience (Esbensen et al., 2001; Esbensen & Weerman, 2005; Spergel, 1995). Wegerhoff, Dixon, and Ward (2019) concluded that efforts to develop a conceptualization of gangs have been plagued by debates related to the construct and definition and considerable disagreement about how to avoid the tautology of including criminal activity as a defining behavior of gangs. The ongoing debate as to the form, function, and nature of gangs remains problematic in two significant ways. First, for the policymakers intent on creating, adopting, implementing, and evaluating gang prevention, intervention, and suppression programming and policies, the lack of a clearly defined and mutually agreed upon problem requiring a social policy response renders any comparative analysis of the efficacy of such responses or the ability to assess the viability of policy transfer from other jurisdictions nearly impossible. Second, the continued focus and attention paid to definitional issues has, at least to some degree, complicated and/or prevented broader analytical and methodologically rigorous efforts, such as meta-analyses, to inform and provide an evidence base from which future policy might be informed (Sullivan, 2006). Alleyne and Wood (2010) insisted that the lack of a clear definition of the phenomenon of gangs has left scholars unclear about whether the gangs examined were similar entities and suggested that research based on assumed similarities could be contextually meaningless. 64 Theoretical Debates Within academia, there exists a long-standing debate over the form and function of gangs, particularly for gangs outside of the United States (Klein, 2001; van Gemert, Petersen, & Lein, 2008; Weerman & Decker, 2005). Some scholars have examined the nature and extent of gang evolution (Ayling, 2011; Weisel, 2002:) and organization (Decker, Katz, & Webb, 2008), and whether gangs constitute a form of organized crime (Decker, Bynum, & Weisel, 1998; Decker & Pyrooz, 2014). Decker and Pyrooz (2014) insisted that it was important to understand gangs relative to other groups, particularly those engaged in transnational criminality, including drug smuggling, human trafficking, and terrorism. They argued that the fundamental difference between gangs and other organized criminal organizations was the necessary requirement in organized crime to funnel at least a portion of the profits from criminal activities back into the organization. Lower level gang members, on the other hand, tended to be disorganized drug dealers that kept the profits for themselves (Decker & Pyrooz, 2011). Densley (2014) concurred noting that gangs evolved from relatively disorganized neighbourhood groups into more corporate entities in response to powerful incentives and a commitment to financial goals. He argued that once gangs reached their highest stage of development, they resembled not just ‘‘crime that is organized, but also something altogether more sinister and difficult to deter; organized crime” (Densley, 2014, p.538). The gang literature disproportionately focuses on disorganized street-level groups comprised of young people (LaFontaine, Ferguson, & Wormuth, 2005; Maxson, Whitlock, & Klein, 1998; McCorkle & Meith, 2002; Papachristos & Kirk, 2006). Contrary to mainstream beliefs, youth street gangs are not highly organized structures, and there is substantial mobility in the first year of membership within and between street gangs in the United States (Decker & Curry, 2000; Decker & Pyrooz, 2014). In effect, Decker and Curry (2000) differentiated street gangs from organized crime structures arguing that the latter have increasingly stable memberships over lengthier periods of time. Klein and Maxson (2006) argued that street gangs were street-oriented groups that exhibited persistence over time made up of youth for whom illegal activity constituted a core element of group identity. This definition was similar to the one that would later be developed by the Eurogang Research Network. 65 The Eurogang Definition The Eurogang network, which is comprised of scholars spanning Europe, North America, Russia, Australia, and Asia, and includes both Klein and Maxson, as well as various other well-respected gang scholars, was formed in the late 1990s and has since met internationally on nine occasions. In 2009, the network became a working group affiliated with the European Society of Criminology. The Eurogang definition of a gang was developed in 2002 and is considered to be the closest to a consensus definition having captured several elements broadly agreed upon by many researchers and policymakers. “A street gang (or troublesome youth group corresponding to a street gang elsewhere) is any durable, street-oriented youth group whose involvement in illegal activity is part of its group identity” (Weerman, Maxson, Esbensen, Aldridge, Medina, & van Gemert, 2009, p.20). To be classified as a ‘full gang member’ of a ‘street gang’, the following Eurogang criteria must be satisfied: 1) the group has three or more people; 2) lasts more than three months; 3) frequents public places without adult supervision; 4) the majority of members are aged 12-25 years old; 5) the group accepts and engages in illegal activity; and 6) self-nominates as a gang member (Matsuda et al., 2012). This definition is somewhat confusing as it includes definitional components of both the gang as a group and the gang member as an individual. As will be discussed below, two of these criteria are problematic in the specific context of gangs in the Lower Mainland; namely the street-oriented and youth-focused nature of this definition. A Canadian Definition Though research on gangs in Canada is sparse relative to other nations, there is a growing body of work in Canada that deserves mention. Scott Wortley from the University of Toronto has published extensively on gangs for more than a decade. His research also considers issues of race, including profiling and discrimination in the Canadian context (Wortley, 2010; Wortley & McCalla, 2008; Wortley & Tanner, 2004). He has done important work on youth gangs and young people in Toronto producing empirical research examining youth motivations for joining gangs. In 2010, Wortley published a report for Public Safety Canada proposing a unified definition of gangs as, A group of three or more individuals that has existed for at least one month and engages in criminal activity on a regular basis. Gang-related crime can be conducted within the group context 66 or by individual gang members in isolation -- as long as such criminal activity, directly or indirectly, benefits the gang (p.3). This definition is a helpful contribution to the Canadian discourse on gangs as it was written in keeping with the form and function of the Eurogang definition, but notably eliminated the youth-centred age requirement and suggested that gangs are not necessarily street-oriented. Wortley’s (2010) definition distinguishes between gang definers (three or more members, in existence for at least one month, involvement in criminal activity) and gang descriptors (personal characteristics of gang members, gang size, level of organization, type of criminal involvement, etc.), while also allowing for the identification of different types of gangs (Wortley, 2010). Kenney and Finckenauer (1995) contended that, in the past, organized crime and gang activity were very distinct events motivated by different goals. Today, distinguishing between the two activities is increasingly difficult. In response, Wortley has suggested that scholars move toward conceptualizing gangs along a spectrum wherein loosely disorganized street gangs are positioned at one end and highly sophisticated organized criminal gangs, including the Hells Angels Outlaw Motorcycle Gang at the other (Wortley, 2010). Locating gangs along this spectrum is not without its own theoretical and conceptual issues. For example, there exists considerable discussion and debate among scholars and practitioners over the point at which a ‘gang' becomes ‘organized crime’. Lavorgna et al. (2013) posited that organized crime depended on the conditions found in the areas where the groups emerged. They argued that various jurisdictions defined organized crime differently, and these different definitions corresponded to the nature of organized crime in each geographic locale. This conclusion was demonstrated with the example of adolescent street gangs in Chicago that evolved into serious organized crime groups when they recognized that their control of inner-city neighbourhoods also allowed them to control the drug trade (Lavorgna et al., 2013). Given the landscape of gangs in BC, the application of a specific definition to locally, structurally, and geographically varied social phenomena remains challenging and inherently problematic. That said, Wortley’s proposed continuum is an effective way to comprehensively map the disparate gangs operating in BC. The Gang Continuum The notion of placing gangs on a continuum first appeared in the literature when Gordon (2000) distinguished between ‘wannabe’ groups, street gangs, and criminal business 67 organizations. This idea has been taken up by practitioners in Canada because of the lack of consensus on how best to theorize and respond to gangs. This resulted in practitioners at the local level making pragmatic decisions concerning the conceptualization and how best to respond to gangs in their jurisdiction. Building on the idea of a gang continuum, Wortley (2010) drew attention to the significant conceptual differences between how law enforcement officials and academic researchers understood gangs and proposed a four-level classification system. In this model, gangs at Level 1 are the most disorganized with unstable membership, no leadership, little planning, and serious violence being rare. At Level 2, the gang has been existence for more than one year, but still has only minimal structure. Members participate in planned and deliberate criminal activity and use violence frequently to respond to common disputes over reputation or honor. At Level 3, a hierarchical organizational structure has developed characterized by an expected code of conduct, sometimes known as the ‘code of the street’ that often includes silence (Matsuda, Melde, Taylor, Freng, & Ebsensen, 2013).26 At this level, the gang has evolved to specialize in a particular criminal activity and deploys serious violence, including using firearms. Finally, at Level 4, there is a long and stable membership history with a sophisticated organizational structure, and clear leaders and followers. At this highest level, the gang may be internationally connected for criminal business transactions, and sometimes employs lower level gangs for grunt work. Serious violence is used to protect economic interests rather than the honor and respect-based violence typical of lower level gangs (see figure 13). Wortley’s (2010) Gang Classification system is a useful construct for considering the issue of gangs in Canada by offering a continuum upon which gangs that present in various forms can be mapped, and is an important contribution, in part, because it recognizes that gangs may exhibit a wide variety of characteristics difficult to render in a single typology. Where it falls short is the absence of any recognition of the potentially different risks for individuals joining the various classifications of gangs assuming that, at every level, membership is expanding. It could be argued that almost all of what we know about youth motivations for joining gangs falls to those joining Wortley’s Level 1 gangs, with very minimal understanding of the recruiting methods or mechanisms and, therefore, little capacity to understand or mitigate the 26 Gang members often make concerted efforts promoting anti-snitching campaigns to create fear of retaliation should an individual consider reporting gang activity to police. In some communities, the fear of being labelled a “snitch” or a “rat” renders people so fearful that they become unwilling to report crimes to police, even when experiencing direct victimization (VPD, 2010). 68 risks for joining gangs beyond Level 1. This has important implications for intervention policies, particularly in geographic areas where there are increasingly sophisticated gangs, which includes much of BC. Problem Definition – Police Defining Gangs Police have yet to agree on a unified definition of gangs, and what police call a gang or gang violence in Canada is sometimes conceptually different across cities and provinces. Even in Canadian law, what is a gang is not clearly defined. The Criminal Code of Canada only makes provision for a broader concept – that of a ‘criminal organization’. Section 467.1(1) of the Canadian Criminal Code defines such an organization as one that: (a) is composed of three or more persons in or outside Canada; and (b) has as one of its main purposes or main activities the facilitation or commission of one or more serious offences that, if committed, would likely result in the direct or indirect receipt of a material benefit, including financial benefit, by the group or any of the persons who constitute the group. As a result of the ambiguity in the Criminal Code of Canada, numerous police organizations have created their own local definitions. For example, the Montreal Police use a definition of a gang that requires six criteria to be met for a group to be categorized as a gang: 1) an organized structure, Figure 13. Wortley's Gang Continuum, Adapted by Author. 69 2) identifiable leadership, 3) a defined geographic area, 4) regular association with several juvenile delinquents, 5) a specific goal, and 6) involvement in illegal activities (Montreal Police Service, 2005). The specificity of this definition is useful, but the requirements of defined geographic territory and focus on juvenile delinquents renders it less applicable in the Lower Mainland. In 2009, the British Columbia Crime Prevention Association defined street gangs as visible, hardcore groups that come together for profit-driven criminal activity and severe violence. They identify themselves through the adoption of colours of clothing and tattoos to demonstrate gang membership to rival gangs. Street gangs are not part of larger criminal organizations and often have geographic ‘turf’ (often specific social housing projects and/or areas they claim to be their own for drug distribution) that they protect from rival gangs. Youth and adults carry out planned and profitable crimes and gratuitous violence against rival gangs. Ethnic and racial composition of gangs is an important defining feature. The strength of this definition lies in its specificity, but this is also a limitation given that the form and function of gangs in BC have shifted over time. One questionable aspect of this definition is its assertion that street gangs are not part of larger criminal organizations (McConnell, 2015). Given that the most desirable and lucrative narcotics (fentanyl, cocaine, heroin) are not locally available and, therefore, must be internationally imported, this is an identifiable weakness of this definition. In June 2011, The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police ‘Street Gang Committee’ offered the definition of a gang as: A gang refers to any group of three or more people, formally or informally organized, which may have a common name or identifying sign or symbol, whose members individually or collectively engage in or have engaged primarily in street-level criminal behaviour, creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in a community. Though this definition was developed at the national level by police leaders, it has yet to be widely adopted by police organizations across Canada for reasons that remain unclear. To date, a nationally recognized definition of gangs by police remains elusive. The CFSEU-BC (2015b) has suggested that gangs in BC have evolved since the early 1990’s when they were primarily ethnic-based gangs with clear divisions between Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caucasian. The late 1990’s saw the development of multi-ethnic gangs in BC, including the United Nations Gang (led by Clayton Roueche), the Red Scorpions (Bacon Brothers), and the Independent Soldiers (CFSEU, 2015c). The CFSEU-BC (2015c) described the recent evolution of gangs in BC to include ‘Enterprise Gangs’ notable for their development of business lines across gangs that were once fierce rivals with less emphasis on 70 individualism reflected in minimal branding or outward signs of gang membership. Specifically, previously competing crime groups are believed to be coming together in formal alliances to share expertise and capture increasing control over territory held by less powerful rivals in illicit markets (CFSEU, 2015c). As a consequence of these differences, common gang prevention and interdiction strategies, which are often neighbourhood-based and aimed at lower income youth and young adults, may simply not apply or may be limited in their application. The CFSEU-BC defines a gang as: an organized group of three or more, that as one of its main purposes or main activities the facilitation or commission of one or more serious offence, that, if committed, would likely result in the direct or indirect receipt of a material benefit, including a financial benefit, by the group or by any one of the persons who constitute the group (CFSEU, 2015a, para. 1). This locally constructed definition notably omits mention of street-level activity, does not include the requirement for outward expressions of gang membership, such as tattoos or clothing, and is not limited by requirements of geography or age. McConnell (2015) noted that stemming from this definition, the CFSEU-BC Prolific Violent Gang Offender Program employs a questionnaire that includes a seven-point structure to determine whether an individual is considered gang involved: 1. Subject is directly or indirectly involved in a gang-related crime or incident; 2. Self-admission of involvement; 3. Reliable source information indicating subject is a gang member; 4. Observable association; 5. Common and symbolic gang identifiers; 6. Court rulings; and 7. Physical evidence. (p.33) McConnell (2015) argued that both gangs and organized crime in BC are difficult to define and he argued that there was considerable overlap in the form, function, and nature of these activities that does not exist elsewhere. His research resulted in several important findings, notably: (a) many gangs in BC are created for the purpose of profiting from drug crime; (b) BC gangs are not geographically centered; (c) BC gangs are neither exclusively mono-ethnic nor aligned by ethnicity; (d) South Asians occupy a unique role in the BC gang landscape;27 and (e) 27 McConnell’s argument here may seem contradictory. He is suggesting that unlike gangs depicted as mono-ethnic elsewhere, for example Latino or African American gangs, these cultural divides are not present in the Lower Mainland with the exclusive exception of South Asian gangs, such as the Brothers Keepers, Dhak-Duhre group, and Kang crime group, which generally maintain exclusively South Asian membership at the upper levels. 71 traditional ‘at-risk’ factors are not necessarily relevant for BC gangs. Setting the Agenda As is often the case with crime-related issues, much of our knowledge with respect to gangs in the Lower Mainland is obtained from media depictions. Richardson and Kennedy (2012) reported in their Canadian newspaper analysis that, in 2010, the term ‘gang’ appeared almost 3,900 times in the top-selling English newspapers. They argued that newspapers have long used the term gang to create interest but offered little common understanding or proffered knowledge of its meaning (Richardson & Kennedy, 2012).Taken together, gang-related violence and the media portrayals that accompany it have prompted a considerable amount of public and political concern over what are thought to be consistently high levels of this violence. To be effective, it is imperative that gang prevention and interdiction strategies be implemented with a solid empirical understanding of the problems that they are designed to prevent and control. Moreover, rigorous collection of longitudinal data is necessary in an effort to assess efficacy of the implemented policy responses. Despite the implementation of thousands of community-based and police programs in response to gangs, there exists little empirical support for the validity of these endeavors, with ad hoc and piecemeal programs emerging in communities across the United States and Canada (Gravel, Bouchard, Descormiers, Wong, & Morselli, 2013). In efforts to devise evidence-based responses, law enforcement and policing organizations are eager to gain an understanding of and have clarity related to the individual, family, and community level correlates that programs should focus on. Unfortunately, our limited understanding of in these areas renders policymakers generally incapable of devising evidence-based and effective prevention, intervention, and suppression programs to combat the demonstrable menace that gangs pose to and in communities across the country. The gang issue in the Lower Mainland is compounded by a dearth of Canadian studies on police responses to gang violence. As Skogan (2014) argued, this is likely a reflection of the difficulty inherent in this type of research, rather than a commentary on its relevance. A primary concern of Canadian policymakers remains the lack of actionable research in policing (Huggins, Wright & Murphy, 2014). 72 The Need for an Evidence Base In an attempt to address the rising costs of policing, Public Safety Canada organized a series of forums on this issue. By 2015, spending on police services in Canada reached 13.9 billion dollars (Mazowita & Greenland, 2016). One of these forums occurred in January 2013. In total, 250 attendees including senior ministers, policy officials, academics, civil servants, police chiefs, frontline police officers, and police union leaders came together. A key message emerged from these discussions; there was an insufficient evidence base for Canadian policymakers to draw upon when making key law enforcement decisions (Huey & Ricciardelli, 2016). Huey and Ricciardelli (2016) argued that the dearth of empirical research on gang policing in Canada was having enormous consequences for Canadian police organizations. They also asserted that, in general, additional research was required to help identify and implement useful policy, programs, and practices to increase public safety and inform police and policy decision-making. The lack of research meant that police were making decisions with an insufficient evidence base, and that policymakers lacked the research to guide the development of effective solutions and coherent guidelines for evaluating the efficacy of programs. This situation rendered police training, including the academic programs offered in universities intended to produce future researchers and police professionals, reliant upon outdated Canadian studies or research produced in other countries (Huey & Ricciardelli, 2016). The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police echoed these concerns when they argued that “without sound data reflecting the Canadian reality, sound decisions are elusive” (Ahlgren, 2015, p. 34). The privileging of efficacy and productivity in the quest for evidence-based policing has transformed policing through the promotion of an agenda in which governance logics and technologies, including performance measurement, best practices, auditing, and benchmarking, are at the forefront of police reform (Feldman, 2018). O’Malley (2008) termed this ‘Actuarial Justice’ describing a calculation of risk as a central governmental technology that underpins policing styles and crime prevention strategies and aims to impose sanctions that incapacitate offenders rather than rehabilitate them. Nowhere is this more evident than in the quantification and computerization that resulted from the development and rapid implementation of the Compstat (which stands for COMPuterized STATistics) policing regime that emerged in the NYPD in the 1990’s (Didier, 2018). Compstat resulted in a new regime of public management in 73 policing with a specific focus on middle management. At the detachment level, managers were expected to “gather data, diagnose the problem through their figures, and then implement appropriate crime fighting measures” (Didier, 2018, p. 519). The results of their efforts would be collated, distributed, and presented at weekly Compstat meetings. Didier noted that in these sessions: Each commander directly confronted top management in real trials by fire. These sessions were held every week, and each commander would take a turn every two months. Sessions were open to the public, so that the community could witness the evaluation of their commander. Sessions were also tense, in that the top brass, who sat in the chair of the evaluator, would denigrate commanders who had failed (2018, p.519). Across the NYPD, Compstat sessions resulted in the dismissal of nearly three-quarters of the commanders over the course of 18 months for their inability to reduce crime in their areas of responsibility (Didier, 2018). Weekly Compstat meetings continue throughout policing organizations across Canada. Didier (2018) acknowledged that meetings today are more amicable, but the ritual of weekly managerial scrutiny continues. Despite enormous advances in data collection abilities, Huey and Ricciardelli (2016) posited that, in general, additional research is required to help identify and implement useful policy, programs, and practices to increase public safety and inform police and policy decision-making. They asserted that the way forward was through the wider adoption of an Evidence-Based Policing (EBP) approach based on developments that have occurred in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Huey and Ricciardelli explained that Evidence-Based Policing embodied the following core tenets: 1. Scientific research has a role to play in developing effective and efficient policing programs; 2. Research produced must meet standards of methodological rigour and be useful to policing; 3. Results should be easily translatable into everyday police practice and policy; and 4. Research should be the outcome of a blending of police experience with academic research skills (2016, p121). These principles have been integrated into well over 100 research projects on a wide variety of policing topics and, as such, the results of these studies have been well received and utilized (Huey & Ricciardelli, 2016). Sherman and Murray (2015) noted that EBP is not only exciting as a vision for conducting policing research but is potentially transformative through its emphasis on police involvement in the research process and the production of translatable results. Sherman defined evidence-based policing as “a method of making decisions about ‘what works’ in policing: which practices and strategies accomplish police missions most cost-effectively…” 74 (2013, p.377). Similarly, Huey and Ricciardelli argued that “Incorporating the police as co-owners of research and the research process is not only viewed as a necessary step to generating productive research …it also increases individual and organizational receptivity to using empirically based findings” (2016, p.126). The quest towards policing programs and practices that are evidence-based is valuable and important, but it is not easy. Though evidence obtained through Randomized Control Trials (RCT’s) is considered the gold standard in the quest for positivist proof of efficacy in the quantitative realm, much of the evidence-based literature has also come to recognize the inherent value in qualitative research for informing practice (Lumsden & Goode, 2018). This dissertation combines the principles of participatory, qualitative research, and two of the core tenets of Evidence-Based Policing methodologies. This is done in an effort to promote the utility of the research findings and to contribute to the identified need for police research, rather than marginalizing the police exclusively as objects to be studied (Bradley & Nixon, 2009). The ‘Economics of Policing’ report, produced by the House Standing Committee (2014) on Public Safety and National Security, acknowledged that “the inability to conduct and coordinate police research leads to police service boards, policy makers, and municipal councils making decisions about policing and police budgets in the absence of any empirical research” (Griffiths et al., 2014, p.42). The tie that binds each of these calls is the need for greater investment in and use of best evidence and practice in policing (Griffiths et al., 2014). The call for an evidence base informed by rigorous evaluation and longitudinal data is convincing. As Huey and Mitchell argued, “police operate within a highly pragmatic environment centred on practical concerns” (2016, p.303). Thus, police require research that is not only framed in accessible language but includes concrete policy and programmatic recommendations leading directly to actionable outcomes (Greene, 2015). That said, it must be acknowledged that determining the specific effects of policy is nearly always challenging (Council of Canadian Academies, 2013). There are several challenges in program effect measurement, including identifying the program objectives and the availability of data that can affect the quality, reliability, and robustness of the assessment (Canadian Council of Academies, 2013). The Canadian Society for Evidence Based Policing has developed a model known as 75 Square One28 for evaluating whether there is evidence in support of a particular program. This model asks five questions before determining whether a program is effective. These questions are: 1) whether the program is based on existing research; 2) whether the program has been independently evaluated; 3) whether the program has been rigorously tested as determined by a level four or higher on the Ratcliffe/Maryland Scientific Scale; 4) whether the program evaluation has been replicated or reproduced; and 5) whether the program has been tested in Canada (CAN-SEBP, 2019). The development of this model is laudable but, given the notable dearth of research on policing in Canada, particularly the lack of rigorous evaluation, it is questionable whether any programs will receive the Square One seal of approval as a program that ‘works’. To date, twenty-two programs have been evaluated using the Square One Model, and not a single evaluated program has met this standard (CAN-SEBP, 2020).29 The concerns with the Square One Model are twofold. First, careful consideration is necessary in considering the utility of a model that sets the bar so high that the likely outcome is that ‘nothing works’ (Bushway, 2013; Howell, 2010; Martinson, 1974). Given the already fragile nature of the relationship between police and academics in Canada (Ricciardelli & Griffiths, 2017) and that, in large part, there has been little academic research highlighting the various programs offered by police across Canada, there is the potential to stagnate future research that would be an effect iatrogenic to the quest for rigorous program evaluation. Second, though there is a necessary and absolute merit to forward a research agenda calling for more rigorous program evaluation, the very nature of a system in which ‘nothing works’ threatens future funding for untested programs of any kind (Howell, 2010). If funders are led to believe that ‘nothing works’ as a result of a system of evaluation that is so rigorous, one outcome may be a reluctance on the part of funders to continue funding programs. The result may be a cyclical challenge where funders will not provide funding for programs that have not been evaluated, but the existing programs also do not have the necessary funding for rigorous evaluation. As a final note, the fact that a program does not meet the threshold established by Square One does not mean that there is nothing positive or 28 https://www.can-sebp.net/squareone 29 The evaluated programs include: Austism Registries, Bait Vehicles, Bicycle Registries, Block Parent, CISD, Crisis Intervention Teams, Co-Response Teams, Cyber-Training, Gun Buyback Programs, Home Security Inspections, Hubs/Situtation Tables, iPrep, Lock it or Lose it, PALS, ProTraining, R2MR, Risk-Based Policing, Risk Terrain Modeling, Silver Alert, TEMPO, Verbal Judo, and Vulnerable Persons Registries (CAN-SEBP. 2020). 76 important to be learned from that program. Given that the focus of this dissertation is on police responses to gang violence rather than on the phenomenon of gangs themselves, an understanding of the importance of community perceptions of police efforts is important. Scholars have also focused on examining the potential effects of individual beliefs on behavior related to the perception of fair treatment and procedural justice30 by institutional authorities fostering law abiding behaviors. Moule, Burruss, Gifford, Parry and Fox (2019) posited that the development of law-related beliefs began in childhood wherein parents’ attitudes and beliefs were communicated, through learning shaped one’s orientation towards the authorities, and worked to instill a sense of right and wrong in their children. Through adolescence, these pre-existing perceptions of law enforcement and other institutional authorities are reinforced through experiences and are essential to the legal socialization process (Trinkner, Jackson, & Tyler, 2018). The procedural justice model of legal socialization mobilizes individual perceptions suggesting that when individuals perceive the police to behave in ways that are procedurally just, they are more likely to trust and cooperate with them, more likely to see the justice system as appropriate, and more likely to internalize pro-social norms (Anderson, 1999; Moule et al., 2019; Trinker & Cohn, 2014; Tyler, 2006). Legal socialization is a process that continues throughout an individual’s lifespan and continues to be shaped and mediated through individual experience (Augustyn & Ward, 2015), the experiences of close friends and family (Rosenbaum, Schuck, Costello, Hawkins, & Ring, 2005), and media portrayals influencing perceptions of procedural justice (Parry, Moule, & Dario, 2019). The importance attributed to perceptions of procedural justice among those experiencing involuntary contacts with the criminal justice system is particularly pronounced (Tyler, 2006). Augustyn and Ward (2015) argued that the importance of procedural justice in behavioral compliance with the law was an important and multi-faceted area of research and argued that the effects of sanctions on subsequent offending behavior cannot be appropriately determined without also considering the context of the sanctioning experience. They hypothesized that 30 Procedural justice refers to the extent to which people feel authorities have treated the individuals over whom they have authority ethically with fairness and respect during decision-making processes, including their openness to dialogue, providing meaningful opportunities to engage, perceptions of the quality of decision-making, and an overall assessment of the interpersonal treatment by authorities (Tyler, 2006). 77 individuals who perceived their interactions with the criminal justice system less favorably in terms of procedural justice would be more likely to offend after a sanctioning experience and sought to test whether perceptions of procedural justice conditioned the effect of a legal sanction on subsequent offending among a sample of 1,354 serious adolescent offenders. They employed a Likert scale asking 38 interview questions regarding the respondent’s most recent interactions with the criminal justice system, with higher scores indicating more positive experiences of procedural justice. Augustyn and Ward (2015) found that procedural justice had an effect on subsequent criminal offending and the frequency of offending concluding that a one standard deviation increase in positive perceptions of procedural justice significantly decreased the odds of subsequent criminal offending by nearly 18%. Conversely, they found that, for individuals with an evaluation of procedural justice one standard deviation below the mean, the effect of involuntary contact was expected to increase the variety offending rate by 57% and increased the frequency offending rate by 105%. They concluded that these findings suggested a nuanced relationship between the imposition of a criminal justice sanction and subsequent criminal offending that is important for policy formation in the assertion that if police and court actors are perceived as procedurally just during sanctioning experiences, this can prevent the sanction from imposing the kinds of criminogenic effects purported by labelling theory31 (Augustyn & Ward, 2015). The importance of this understanding is in its relevance for policy creation, particularly as it relates to police interactions in situations of involuntary contact. As Sherman argued, procedural injustice “is about a failure of the state to persuade its citizens to comply with a rule of law” (2014, p. 155). These findings contributed to a broader body of literature that examined the negative perceptions of procedural justice that has been shown to have a significant indirect effect on legal cynicism; an idea that reflects the perception that the law is marginalizing and generated by social institutions that treat disadvantaged people unfairly. This effect has the potential to reinforce the view that the law is not binding in everyday life supporting street code beliefs (Tyler, 2006; Moule et al., 2019). The renewed interest in police-community relations combined with a focus on the influence of cultural norms on youth offending suggests that there 31 Labeling theory suggests that sanctions would contribute to subsequent criminal behavior whereas specific deterrence purports that legal sanctions should reduce criminal offending. On their own, neither of these two theories have been found to offer an adequate explanation for the relationship between sanctions and ensuing criminal behavior, although elements of both theories continue to be incorporated in the criminal justice system’s use of diversion, alternative measures, restorative justice, and punishment for young offenders (Augustyn & Ward, 2015). 78 may be important linkages between the prominent constructs of perceived procedural justice and community subculture, which will be examined in the following chapter as an important condition necessary in the development of police-community relationships. 79 Chapter 3. Research on Gangs and Responses to Gang Members Though there have been efforts to improve the body of knowledge, many researchers have noted the paucity of research on gangs and police responses in Canada (Ezeonu, 2014; Gordon, 2000; Grekul & LaBoucane-Benson, 2008; Hemmati, 2006; Urbanik, 2018). A brief examination of the Canadian scholarly literature renders noticeable two insights important to this research; the absence of research that focuses on police responses, rather than on gangs as a matter of subject, and the dearth of research specifically on BC, as a significant component of the research is Toronto or Prairie-based. Much of that research offers cautions identifying the problematic nature related to the reliance on US gang literature to inform Canadian policy and practice in gang-related programming and policies. Much of the local research suggests that gangs in BC are qualitatively different than those found in other locales (Bhat & Tweed, 2018; McConnell, 2015; Surrey, 2018; VPD, 2010). Given this, the Canadian literature on gangs will not be examined. Instead, I will focus on the local, offering a chronological overview of the scholarly research on gangs focused specifically on British Columbia to offer context and understanding of the local research on gangs that preceded this project, and to provide an overview of the information and research that police in BC refer to in their efforts to respond to gang violence. The second half of the chapter includes examines specific programs in the literature on the police gang prevention, intervention, and suppression programs. The subheading topics identified in this chapter mirror the programs brought forward by police participants as having been deployed or implemented, to be examined in Chapter 6. The focus of this literature review of these programs is often on broader crime prevention programs because there is insufficient focus in the Canadian literature on the ways in which these programs have been implemented specifically in efforts to reduce gang activity. In some cases, the police officers did not specifically mention the programs identified in the literature, but their descriptions seem to replicate those programs, such as a youth counselling program in Delta that, at least on the face of it, seemed to be premised on the multi-systemic therapy model. It is interesting to note that, in some cases, participants did not seem to be aware that the programs implemented in their jurisdictions were derived from programs implemented elsewhere. This examination of the 80 literature attempts to offer an overview of the scholarly literature on the programs that were identified by the police in their efforts to respond to gang violence. Despite cautions early in the chapter of the applicability of US research and responses in the Canadian context, in some cases, US programs are identified and discussed because the programs that have been implemented in the Lower Mainland originated in the US, for example school presentations and wraparound programming. Each of the programs reviewed in this chapter were selected for examination only because they have been adapted and implemented in some way by police in Abbotsford, Surrey, and Delta. As such, this is not a comprehensive overview of all prevention, intervention, and suppression strategies; only those that appeared in the local context are discussed here. The chapter concludes with a specific focus on existing evaluations that speak to the efficacy of these measures. This consideration of the available literature and concordant recognition of the dearth of research that informs best practice is important to understand the historical and current police responses to gang violence in BC. The American Experience As a consequence of the relative lack of Canadian research, practitioners and policymakers tend to look to the American experience of gang prevention and interdiction (Dunbar, 2017; Ezeonu, 2014). Wortley and Tanner (2004) suggested that, in the absence of a body of Canadian literature, gang research was beholden to American contexts and discourses. Similarly, Hemmati (2006) asserted that “what we call a gang or gang violence in Canada is conceptually and structurally different across cities and provinces, and from the assortment of youth organizations or problems extensively studied by American scholars” (p.24). In considering the risks of borrowing gang policy from US-based experts, Ezeonu (2014) asserted that “considering the lingering contentions over the nature, structure, and organization of gangs generally, Canada does not stand to benefit significantly from the American ‘gang’ experience” (p.4). Ezeonu also argued that it was important to look at the ways in which the sociopolitical history of Canada can help explain the gang problem in Canada. He cautioned: American gang scholarship tends to focus disproportionately on racial minority youths. This has provided the ‘scientific’ tool to justify the control of this population through mass incarceration, police harassment, and racial profiling. Instead of simply replicating American policies, Canadian stakeholders should reflect the national kaleidoscope in designing policy interventions specifically suited to the country’s gang problem (p.5). 81 Similarly, in their research on Indigenous gangs in Canada, Grekul and LaBoucane-Benson (2008) reasoned that there were substantial differences between Canada and the US, including differences between the countries in history, ethnic and cultural composition, government policies, health and educational apparatuses, gun control, drug legislation, and policing that testify to the inadequacy of relying solely on the US produced research and literature as sources of information (2008, p.60). The most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the US are characterized by absolute poverty, income inequality, higher levels of crime, and greater gun availability than similar neighbourhoods in Canada (Miller, Azrael, & Hemenway, 2013; Oreopoulous, 2008). Thompson and Gartner (2014) noted that a contextual comparison of the two countries reveals distinctive structural differences, including that racial segregation and exclusion are less pronounced in Canada. Even the more affluent communities in the US are fundamentally different from those in Canada in terms of education, cultural demography, access to health care, rates of violence, and governing criminal laws (Miller et al., 2013; Oreopoulos, 2008). McCuish, Bouchard, and Corrado (2015) noted that caution should be exercised before generalizing research from the US to local gangs, particularly when considering that the BC gang landscape exists in an area of Canada with less racial segregation and lower levels of poverty, which is, in some important ways, fundamentally different from the socioeconomic circumstances of gangs operating in many neighborhoods across the US. Given these differences, the literature on police responses to gang violence in the US is likely only partly applicable to the Lower Mainland situation. Alleyne and Wood (2010) echoed this point cautioning that the American stereotype of gangs has been adopted by many European countries to inform their definitions, which has negatively influenced empirical research and stunted the growth and development of Euro-centred research. They called this proclivity the ‘Eurogang paradox’ (Alleyne & Wood, 2010, p.423). This assertion was supported by Smithson, Ralphs, and Williams (2013) who suggested that the influence of US gang policing tactics was apparent in UK responses, such as the development of specialized gang databases, injunctions, and police suppression units. They also noted that this likely stemmed from an uncritical assessment of the ways in which gangs were defined and studied, relying solely on US definitions and literature without considering the local context. As with policy transfer more generally, policymakers working to suppress gang violence often look to the US and its lengthy history of suppression-based specialized policing units to inform their own policies (Hallsworth & Young, 2008). 82 The landscape of organized crime and gang activity in BC is rapidly changing (CFSEU, 2015c). McConnell (2015) demonstrated that BC gangs are rarely led by those under 25 years old. Moreover, he posited that the local gang landscape contradicted the prevailing narrative by gang scholars that gangs were predominantly formed by poor and minority-dominated youth gathering in disorganized street level groups (Howell & Egley, 2005; LaFontaine, Ferguson, & Wormuth, 2005; Maxson et al., 1998; McCorkle & Meith, 2002; Papachristos & Kirk, 2006). This has not manifested itself in BC with many participants in the gang subculture emanating from upper middle-class socio-economically privileged homes (Bhatt & Tweed, 2018; McConnell, 2015; Surrey 2018; VPD, 2010). McConnell pointed to research by Reddicopp (2016) suggesting that many Canadian gangs were highly organized with a clear vertical structure and were heavily engaged in the drug trade with the key goal being accumulation of wealth and profit, similar to the structure of organized criminal groups. Much like the situation in the broader literature, at the local level, much is left to be known about the changing role and nature of gangs. To be sure, responses grounded in the American experience may be helpful in the Canadian context, particularly when the gang problem being addressed involves lower-income youth living in extremely disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods, a demographic upon which the overwhelming majority of U.S.-based theory and research on gangs notes as an important correlate of risk for gang activity (Decker, Melde, & Pyrooz, 2013; Esbensen et al., 2009; Hill et al., 2001; Howell & Egley, 2005; Mrazek & Haggerty, 1994; Reddicopp, 2016). However, there may be important differences between the gang problem in the Lower Mainland, and in other Canadian and American jurisdictions, that may be incompatible with extant theory and research. Dunbar (2017) concluded that “although there are advantages in learning from the American experience, there is a danger in assuming that the cause(s) and structure of gangs are the same in the United States and in Canada” (p.3). Notable differences may be related to the socio-demographic backgrounds of some gang members in the Lower Mainland, many of whom appear to be middle-class youth and young adults, often with a plethora of so-called ‘legitimate’ opportunities for success (Surrey, 2018). Other key differences may be related to gang boundaries that in places like Surrey and Abbotsford appear not to be tied to specific neighbourhoods or to smaller localities within neighbourhoods, but to larger geographies with low-level drug dealers moving easily across and between neighborhoods to sell drugs (Bhatt & 83 Tweed, 2018; CFSEU, 2015c; Surrey, 2010; VPD, 2010). Unlike many other areas of Canada and the United States (US), the primary form of drug dealing in BC is known as ‘dial-a-doping’ or ‘dialing’. The proliferation of ‘dial-a-doping’ using vehicles much like pizza delivery as a primary means of distributing illegal narcotics is a hallmark of the drug trade in BC resulting in very few hand-to-hand street level drug transactions (CFSEU, 2015b). Dial-a-doping will be examined in much greater detail in Chapter Five. As a defining characteristic of gang activity in the Lower Mainland, dial-a-doping affects the nature, form, and function of gangs in BC where frontline drug dealing is not a street-based activity denoted by clear geographic territories, but is divided by ‘lines’ across the Lower Mainland (CFSEU, 2015b; Surrey, 2018). The qualitative data collected for this dissertation suggests that the police, politicians, and media may perceive the landscape of gangs in BC to include groups that exist within all four categories of Scott Wortley’s continuum, but that local police organizations focus their resources and efforts predominantly on gangs that can be classified at the third and fourth levels, with much less police and media attention paid to the more loosely organized street-based youth gangs that are the predominant focus of the academic literature. The qualitative interviews revealed that, for the most part, suppression strategies conducted by dedicated gang officers focused on members of gangs at the more serious end of Wortley’s continuum; namely that most gangs in BC are hierarchical, with relatively stable membership at the higher ranks. Gangs in BC are also structured, use economic or strategic violence, including firearms, and conduct business internationally. The caveat to this was police perceptions of South Asian gangs being described as chaotic and unpredictable as a result of the power vacuum that has characterized BC gangs of late, as will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Five. As will be noted in the methodology chapter, one limitation of this research is my inability to challenge claims made by police officers that the situation in BC is qualitatively different than elsewhere in Canada or the US. There is limited research in this area, though McConnell’s (2015) research argued that gangs in BC should be considered a hybrid of gang/organized crime groups and were typically much more organized than the usual street gang. As might be the case in other places, in BC, gangs are focused on making financial profits through extensive and enormously profitable dial-a-doping networks (CFSEU, 2015c; Juhasz, 2019; McConnell, 2015; Surrey, 2018). Without more comparative data, the oft repeated assertions related to the uniqueness of BC gangs remains an avenue of research inquiry in need 84 of fulsome examination. Those who purport these positions argue that gangs in BC are unlike the gangs traditionally examined in the literature as they are not geographically defined, lack the clear divisions along ethnic or cultural lines frequently seen elsewhere, and, in recent years, do not typically display the outward signs of gang affiliation, such as insignia on clothing or wearing gang colors (British Columbia Taskforce on Illegal Firearms, 2017; McConnell, 2015; Surrey, 2018). Though the lack of comparative research elsewhere limited my ability to find empirical support for these claims/perceptions, it is important to recognize that the policy responses in these jurisdictions have been formulated premised upon the perceptions frequently expressed by police during qualitative interviews, reinforced by the media, and iterated frequently in the local research; that gangs in BC are different than gangs elsewhere (Bhatt & Tweed, 2018; McConnell, 2015; Surrey, 2018; VPD, 2010). A Chronological Examination of Scholarly Research on BC Gangs In the early stages of this research, the paucity of understanding of the gang landscape in BC became apparent (Hemmati, 2006). There is a surprising lack of academic research on gangs in BC given the enormous policy attention from all levels of government and the sustained period of intense gang violence in the province. This is particularly interesting given that representatives of law enforcement have been repeatedly quoted in the media claiming that BC’s gang presence has increased substantially over the last two decades (Descormiers, 2013; Gravel et al., 2018; Surrey, 2018; VPD, 2010). The typical gang literature from developed nations often describes gang involvement at the neighborhood level highlighting the poor socioeconomic conditions, and may, therefore, have somewhat limited relevance to those joining gangs in the Lower Mainland of BC (McCuish et al., 2015; McConnell, 2015). A comprehensive search for academic literature on the specific topic of gangs in Vancouver produced a limited number of results with only a few publications in the past two decades, which will be examined below, in chronological order. In 2000, Rob Gordon (SFU) published the Greater Vancouver Gang Study that involved research on 128 known gang members sampled from the caseloads of corrections personnel in January 1995. Interviews were conducted with 33 of those individuals who agreed to participate in the study and found that, to be effective, policy and program responses should recognize the difference between gang organizations in their structure. In his work, Gordon (2000) posited that 85 there were three main groups; street gangs, “wanna be” groups, and more sophisticated criminal business organizations. Given that this research is now 25 years old, its utility in reflecting the modern experience of gangs in Vancouver is limited, but it was notably the first research of its kind regionally. Though now dated, in 2002, the comprehensive Canadian Police Survey on Youth in Gangs sought to catalogue the “extent and characteristics of the youth gang problem in communities throughout Canada, as reported by police agencies” and set the stage for the understanding of youth gangs in Canada (Chettleburgh, 2002, p.1). This study surveyed participants from 349 police agencies across every province and territory in Canada. A youth gang member was defined as being under the age of 21 years old and participants were instructed to exclude motorcycle gangs, hate or ideology groups, prison gangs, and other exclusively adult gangs from their responses (Chettleburgh, 2002). One interesting finding of this research, particularly given its early genesis, was that nearly half of the respondents surveyed (44 per cent) indicated that youth gangs were perceived to be working in collaboration with organized crime groups to traffic narcotics (Chettleburgh, 2002). Several years later, Toni Hemmati’s (2006) survey on The Nature of Canadian Urban Gangs and their Use of Firearms included the VPD as one of six Canadian policing jurisdictions that participated in the study that included a survey on the nature of urban gangs and police initiated programmatic responses. In examining Vancouver, Hemmati (2006) noted that: It appears that the urban gangs of Vancouver are not territorial, but rather identify themselves along ethnic and crime specialization lines rather than geographic boundaries. Specifically, more than one gang may operate in the same geographical location but possibly due to the type of crimes being committed or the ethnic groups they belong to, disputes over territory are not common (p.16). Interestingly, Hemmati (2006) found that the majority of urban gangs at that time were identified by ethnic composition, noting that there were Asian, South Asian, and Indigenous gangs. This research appears to be the earliest reference to South Asian gangs in the literature noting: The Indo gangs of Vancouver are exclusively male. Gang membership appears to be tied to an antisocial expression of caste or clan, meaning that these gangs can be subdivided by Indo-ethnic origins. Of the different ethnic categories of urban gangs in Vancouver, the Indo gangs appear to engage in violent crime more frequently than the other urban gangs particularly in regard to shootings. Offences, insults, and disrespect toward an Indo gang can elicit a violent response in retaliation and can result in violence between gangs. Typical offences committed by these gangs are drug distribution, fraud and assault. While criminal activity involves economic gain, the predominance of violent crime is committed between Indo gangs of different cultural backgrounds (p.17). 86 Hemmati (2006) examined the United Nations gang, established in 2004, as including members from various ethnic backgrounds. This is signalled as contradictory to the conclusions above, but indicates a shift in what would come in gang membership in Vancouver. The United Nations gang in this report was called a street gang that operates exclusively for economic reasons, specializes in the importation and exportation of illicit narcotics and illegal firearms, and generally committed violence related to high value importation/exportation transactions. Hemmati (2006) concluded that it would be beneficial to develop a universal definition of street gang or urban gang, an issue that remains unresolved, as discussed in the previous chapter. The Vancouver Police Department’s (2010) report Taking Back Vancouver’s Streets: The Truth about Gangs took up this issue and sought to define the nature of gangs operating in Vancouver. The report concluded that there were three types of gangs operating in Vancouver at that time. The first type was defined as Street Level/Entry Level Youth Gangs. These groups were comprised of individuals in their teens through to their early 20’s, loosely organized or structured, who participated in street-level crimes, and were sometimes associated with higher level gangs through dial-a-doping activities. The second type was defined as Organized/Mid-Level gangs in which individuals tended to be older and more sophisticated or organized in their criminal activity with a more stable membership. The VPD concluded that, in this group, the image of being a gangster was vital with members driving flashy vehicles, wearing body armour, and carrying firearms to promote their image. The third type identified by the VPD were the Organized Gangs/High-Level Organized Crime. In this category, gangs had “the highest degree of sophistication, influence, structure, wealth, and power” (VPD, 2010, p.11). The VPD insisted that members of these gangs were typically well insulated from the criminality they controlled and thus often appeared as legitimate businesspeople making them very difficult to prosecute (VPD, 2010). The VPD concluded that “gang membership criteria cited in most literature and used to identify gang members simply does not apply to many Vancouver gangs” and “the typical gang member in Vancouver is a young male who comes from a middle-class home with access to material benefits and has the opportunity to pursue other life choices” (2010, pp.22-23). This report went on to articulate the ways in which gangs in Vancouver are different from those found elsewhere, including that Vancouver gangs are not ethnically oriented, members do not come from impoverished families, and “there are virtually no gangs that assert specific neighborhoods as their territory and defend them as such” (VPD, 2010, p.23). 87 Also, in 2010, the Abbotsford Youth Commission prepared a community consultation paper Gangs, Girls, and Sexual Exploitation in British Columbia. This paper indicated that little local research existed and suggested that research from other areas focused on individual risk factors, including poverty, lack of education, history of victimization, substance abuse, and the need to offer greater support to families. The report concluded that, while it was important that these individual risk factors be given the attention they necessarily deserved, much of what was known of the gang experience in BC indicated that the local landscape challenged the traditional knowledge of risks for gang activity. The profile of BC gangs suggested that there was no clear division along ethnic or cultural lines, gangs in BC were not geographically defined, and members did not suffer from socio-economic marginalization (BC, 2017; McConnell, 2015). In 2013, Karine Descormiers defended her unpublished PhD dissertation From Getting in to Getting out: The Role of Pre-Gang Context and Group Processes in Analyzing Turning Points in Gang Trajectories that examined 73 self-identified gang members incarcerated at the only youth custody centre in the Lower Mainland, located in Burnaby. Her sample consisted primarily of males (nearly 90 per cent), with an average age of 16.5 years old. Respondents reported having joined a gang when they were approximately 13 years old. What was interesting about her sample is its level of racial diversity. Given the enormous body of literature with respect to Indigenous overrepresentation in prison, her sample consisted of 25% Indigenous participants. What was surprising was that only 12% of her sample was South Asian, which was disproportionate from what would be expected given media coverage on the level of gun violence that affected young South Asian men. Descormiers (2013) also explored individual motivations concluding that the most prevalent motivation for gang membership were consistent with those found in the literature, including money (74 per cent) combined with a desire to obtain respect (73 per cent). Just over half of respondents (53 per cent) indicated that they joined a gang for protection, and 34% indicated that it was to make friends. Her research considered the characteristics and associated pathways that led to their gang affiliation, finding that nearly 70% of participants reported having a family member who was also involved in gang activity, and 60% reporting having been introduced to the gang by at least one friend. These findings supported the need for continued research into social networks. At present, this research area is inherently constrained by the limited nature of police databases from which the data for analysis is extracted. That said, scholarly understanding of social networks remains an important avenue 88 of research. The participants in this research were violent incarcerated youth in the Lower Mainland, but caution should be taken before generalizing these findings as the individual motivations and circumstances of those who were incarcerated may be arguably different from individuals who have, by virtue of their socioeconomic status and position, managed to avoid incarceration. Replicating the methodology of this research with at-risk youth involved in intervention programming in the community, rather than with incarcerated youth, may yield important insights. As noted previously, an emerging area of interest in research on gangs involves the use of social network analysis. In a research project with this focus, Bouchard and Konarski (2014) used police data to identify the core members of the Aldergrove-based32 856 gang. This gang was comprised mainly of middle-class youth and became a significant concern to the community and received widespread media attention after two attempted murders and the very public attempted assassination at gunpoint of the father of one of the alleged 856 members (Bouchard & Konarski, 2014). The results of this project identified 60 offenders as potential members of the gang, as determined by an arrest with one of the six core identified members that were targeted for arrest and prosecution in the summer of 2007. This research project demonstrates the utility of social network analysis not only for academics, but also as a practical tool for police. In 2015, Sergeant Keiron McConnell was working with the Vancouver Police Departments’ gang squad and defended his doctoral work. His research project conducted a multi-sited qualitative inquiry comparing the gang landscapes across three countries in the cities of London, England; Chicago and Los Angeles in the US; and Toronto (Ontario), Hobbema (Alberta), and the Lower Mainland of BC in Canada as part of his dissertation research for his Ph.D. (McConnell, 2015). McConnell (2015) found that the economic, social, and marginalization factors that existed in many gang entrenched areas elsewhere did not have the same influence in BC where a large number of gang-involved youth “do not appear to possess the typical antecedents to gang involvement” (p.2). He noted that unlike the other locations he studied, gangs in BC were often not street-oriented, and did not present as groups of young people defending territory on street corners. McConnell (2015) also demonstrated that gangs in 32 Aldergrove is a small community in the township of Langley policed by the Langley RCMP. 89 BC were highly mobile and could not be contained or limited to geographic regions as they were not built on, nor were they the social products of neighbourhoods. In his examination of the gang literature, McConnell (2015) reasoned that many scholars argued that gangs were formed as a result of poverty, racism, and disaffection, while other scholars claimed that gangs were formed as a result of poor education, disruptive and dysfunctional families, or issues of masculinity. He concluded that the motivators for gang involvement in BC were very different from the traditional well-accepted risk factors from the literature, such as low socioeconomic status, intergenerational familial involvement, marginalization, and lack of opportunity. These correlates were less likely to be motivating forces for gang members in BC. He reasoned that factors related to status, perceived wealth, and the highly visible celebrity-like prestige afforded to gang members receiving VIP treatment in bars, restaurants, and nightclubs in BC were seen as more compelling. McConnell (2015) concluded that the BC gang landscape had some of the traditional at-risk youth seen elsewhere, but was also characterized by what he called ‘non-traditional at-risk youth’, described as young people coming from stable families and were characterized by a “lack of work ethic, a sense of entitlement, and an unwillingness to be patient and work towards a goal in a legitimate, legal manner” (McConnell, 2015, p. 146). McConnell’s (2015) study is an important empirical contribution to the research for its conclusion that gangs in BC were inherently different from those in other places, and his assertion that this understanding was necessary in an effort to implement more appropriate context-specific interventions. Also, in 2015, McCuish, Bouchard, and Corrado researched the role of social networking, specifically the role of this network on decision-making. They closely examined the co-offending network of one BC gang focusing on individual gang members engaged in lethal co-offending seeking to identify differences between those who engaged in homicide and those who did not. One noted limitation of their research is the reliance on official data which, they suggested, likely resulted in the underreporting of co-offending events in their data. Despite this, they concluded that “gang homicide appears deeply rooted in the social networks in which gang members evolve” (McCuish et al., 2015, p.333) and suggested that future research following the criminal trajectories of adolescents convicted of homicide may be a worthwhile endeavor because the murder for which they were convicted may serve to enhance their status. By 90 following these young people post-release, researchers have the opportunity to monitor the successful transition from young offender to criminally entrenched adult. Taken together, the research originating in BC suggests that those joining gangs in the Lower Mainland appeared to frequently originate from middle-class families rather than the low-income and resource-limited communities typical in the literature from the US or other parts of Canada (Bhatt & Tweed, 2018; McConnell, 2015; Sangha, 2018; Surrey, 2018; VPD, 2010). As yet, there are no empirically recognized risk factors for gang membership in BC. In effect, it is unclear whether and to what extent notions of masculinity, experiences of racism, and levels of family dysfunction may be correlated with propensity for gang affiliation in the Lower Mainland. This poses challenges for communities because the traditional approaches to gang prevention, intervention, and enforcement likely need to be adapted to the specific underlying pathways and correlates of gang involvement that motivate Lower Mainland youth to participate in gang activities. In one of the few research projects in BC that specifically examined police practices, Gahunia (2017) conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with key stakeholders who both enforced and participated in a program developed specifically to deter gang members in BC, known as Restaurant Watch. This program was created in response to restaurant owners who expressed concerns about the risk of victimization gang members brought with them into public spaces, and thereby the increased risk that innocent bystanders might experience (Gahunia, 2017). The Restaurant Watch program targets known or suspected gang members who, under the liquor control act and restaurant policies, may be asked for identification by police and, if found to be associated to gangs, will be asked to leave the establishment. Failure to do so is considered a violation of section 4 of the Trespass Act (Gahunia, 2017). Gahunia (2017) found the program to be successful in its ability to deter gang members from attending restaurants enrolled in the Barwatch program, and the application of this program as a secondary intervention strategy will be examined in further detailed in Chapter Six and given consideration as a practice focused on displacement of crime. In 2017, Bouchard and Hashimi argued that longitudinal research on gang-related violence in the Lower Mainland was challenging because the requisite data are not publicly available. What we do know is gleaned from police press releases and media accounts, both of 91 which tend to offer cross-sectional snapshots of this violence over relatively short periods of time, such as year-to-date figures or year-to-year comparisons. In their efforts to analyze waves of gang violence, Bouchard and Hashimi (2017) found that their best source of information was actually an open source website, Prime Time Crime.33 From there, they cross-referenced media releases from BC’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team and ran a ProQuest media search to establish their sample. They then used two distinct data analysis methods to identify trends in gang violence in BC from 2006 to 2012. Bouchard and Hashimi (2017) concluded that trends could first be examined through a monthly calendar examination of crime data. These data could be further analyzed by employing a micro-approach to map trends to identify spikes in violence that differed significantly from the norm, measuring deviations from the mean number of days between homicides. Using the monthly approach, Bouchard and Hashimi (2017) were able to identify four distinct waves between 2006 and 2012 and linked these waves to discernible events noting that each was triggered by peak moments of known gang conflicts that triggered the beginning of the violence. However, they noted that from open source data, they were not able to identify the trigger events for the 12 smaller micro-events (significant deviations from the mean number of days between homicides). They concluded that the two approaches should be used in a complementary way, ideally supplemented by both open-source and police-related data. This finding suggested that datasets created to the exclusion of police data were incomplete as were those that relied only on open sources. In 2017, Fast, Shoveller, and Kerr (2017) conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Vancouver with a group of 15 young men drawn from a larger sample of 44 that participated in a longitudinal study from 2008 to 2016. Drawing on over eight years of qualitative and ethnographic research, their research sought to trace participants’ involvement as dial-a-dopers in Vancouver’s drug scene across time, including a consideration of their initiation/recruitment into these activities, the transitions in the intensity of their involvement, and the periods of time when they attempted to cease their involvement altogether. Their research investigated the importance of adopting a life course perspective in attempting to meaningfully address the social and human harms associated with involvement in drug dealing and crime among youth in Vancouver. They 33 Prime Time Crime (http://www.primetimecrime.com/) is published by Leo Knight, a former Vancouver police officer and well known blogger in Vancouver. 92 suggested that participants were frequently subcontracted by gang members as low-level players to engage in auto theft, robbery, or enforcement assignments. In determining whether these young men were gang involved, the Author’s contended: For the young men in this study, however, there was no ambiguity surrounding this term. When youth referred to gangs, they were referring to both the organized crime syndicates who largely control the drug trade in British Columbia (namely, a North American outlaw motorcycle gang and transnational Chinese gang), as well as a handful of more local street gangs. As has been described elsewhere (Densley, 2014), while these more local street gangs may have begun as loose groupings of youth formed in high schools and juvenile detention facilities, as they have grown and formed alliances with organized crime syndicates they have also come to play a significant role in large scale drug trafficking in British Columbia, including across the Canada-US border……the majority of the young men who self identified as being, or having recently been, involved in dealing were tenuously affiliated with one of the gangs described above (p.4). In recounting their experiences, participants often noted that after an initial period of close supervision, they would move up the ranks within the gang to become a boss with their own set of frontline low-level dial-a-dope drug dealers. The Author’s suggested that this gang-related illicit employment would ebb and flow with heightened period of activity, but usually within the same gang. Interestingly, Fast et al. (2017) were also cognizant of the ‘waves’ of violence described by Bouchard and Hashimi (2017) noting, During the study period in 2009, Vancouver was the site of a gang war in which more than 20 people were killed as gangs vied for control of particular dial-a-doping drug lines. The street-based drug scene in Greater Vancouver was altered by these events. The young men in this study described local street gangs becoming increasingly disorganized, as they rapidly recruited members and affiliates on the streets and in criminal justice facilities in an effort to increase their numbers. In the absence of the more long-term, established relationships that usually underpin gang membership and even affiliation, the employer-employee relationships described above became even more fleeting (p.4). The field research completed by Fast et al. (2017) offers an important and unique contribution to the literature in its consideration of the concept of ‘crushing boredom’ as a motivating factor for participation in gang membership that powerfully shaped involvement in drug dealing and crime by noting that in order to understand young men’s initiation into and sustained involvement in these ‘risky’ activities, we also need to examine how dealing and crime opened up new value systems, moral logics, and affects in relation to the tremendous risks, potential rewards, and crushing boredom (p.2). Though many of the participants in this study were socioeconomically marginalized or had spent periods of time in foster care, this notion of ‘boredom’ is particularly interesting, and novel given 93 the context of the gang landscape in BC. The Author’s noted that participants often used the language of boredom to rationalize why, even after successfully exiting the drug dealing scene for periods of time, they re-entered these activities periodically as a way of achieving a desired sense of forward momentum in their lives – a sense that they were once again ‘in the center of something’ – as opposed to being bored and ‘trapped’ in the margins’ (Fast et al., 2017, p.3). Their research concluded by saying “our long-term ethnographic research with youth has consistently demonstrated that, even when they have succeeded in exiting dealing and crime, getting clean off drugs, and securing relatively stable housing, many eventually begin lamenting the boredom of their daily routines” (Fast et al., 2017, p.8). The concept of boredom as a motivator for gang participation is not prominent in the current literature on youth motivations for gang activity. For this reason, it is perhaps an important contribution and worthy of additional research. In 2018, Madsen explored the unionized environment of the seaports of Vancouver, a conduit for smuggling illegal drugs from Asia into Canada and America by organized crime groups. He argued that Vancouver’s ports had become a contested arena that placed law enforcement and government agencies against organized criminal groups, like the Hells Angels, that have long had an established presence at these facilities and had begun infiltrating waterfront unions. Madsen (2018) argued that criminal activity was endemic at the ports as a result of a lack of policing, inadequate resources, and indifference from three key groups; port authorities, employer bodies, and union leadership. This structural barrier as a major international thoroughfare for illicit narcotics has important implications for organized crime and gangs in BC and has recently been the focus of media attention. Delta Police Chief Neil Dubord received national media attention calling for renewed federal and provincial funding to establish a policing presence at the port. Chief Dubord is quoted in The Star as saying “At the ports, we found there was no dedicated policing to the organized crime that is happening there, other than the integrated teams that have other responsibilities throughout the Lower Mainland” (St. Denis, 2019). This perceived weakness and the police officer perceptions of the resulting consequences will be examined in the findings and policy implications discussion. Also published in 2018, Gravel et al. explored the evolution of the social construction of gang violence in Vancouver, BC from the perspective of two important actors; the police and the media. They argued that the interests of the police and the media coincided following high- 94 profile shootings and that this process was an essential ingredient in later policy decisions that established new gang units. Their research explored a recursive system in which media representations of gang violence in BC as a serious social problem helped justify the establishment of gang units that resulted in additional media coverage as these units provided the media with more information about gang-related incidents, thereby serving to legitimize the initial claim that specialized gang units were necessary for public safety. The next section offers a literature of the scholarly literature on the prevention, intervention, and suppression programs that are examined in the Findings chapters. Given that most of the time the police officers I interviewed never mentioned the theoretical origins of the programs that have been implemented, it seemed incongruent to include this information alongside their contributions presented in the Findings chapters. The intention of the inclusion here is twofold; to provide the framework from the literature that either supports or refutes the utility of these programs and to provide the necessary context upon which the programs reported by police in the Findings chapters can be mapped. In several instances, specific police initiatives are situated in the broader crime prevention literature, but there does not exist scholarly reference that these programs have focused specifically on gangs. In those cases, the broader crime prevention initiatives are examined. Overview of Gang Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression Programs Much of the literature broadly categorizes gang-related programs and initiatives in Canada as distributed across three levels of intervention: primary, including prevention campaigns and raising awareness; secondary, or targeted intervention programming; and tertiary, defined as suppression, rehabilitation, and exit strategies (Mellor, MacRae, Pauls, & Hornick, 2005). Primary prevention programs aim to address the potential for issues to emerge affecting a large segment of the population and take the form of awareness campaigns, general education programs, and targeted education initiatives. Prevention programs are usually community-based and serve to broadly educate all young people who may or may not be at-risk for or part of a group that may experience an increased likelihood of joining a gang. Beyond education, prevention approaches also attempt to broadly increase the protective factors within the community (Mellor et al., 2005). Gebo (2016) noted that primary prevention would include 95 universal strategies that work to immunize individuals and groups against participation in gang membership. In the field of gang prevention, secondary interventions include targeted programming and outreach aimed at those individuals who were most at-risk for gang participation focusing on disengagement by encouraging and assisting gang members to exit gangs and the gang lifestyle by increasing the protective factors specific to that individual. Gebo (2016) argued that this could be directed toward those individuals who had family and friends in gangs, as well as those who lived in neighbourhoods with a notable gang presence. Gebo’s (2016) work emphasized the importance of moving away from the context of gangs and, instead, considering the utility of the kinds of secondary interventions more broadly used for general violence. In considering Gebo’s (2016) recommendations, it is important to ensure that an unintended consequence is not the pathologizing or stigmatizing of specific neighborhoods that could result in additional and perhaps unnecessary police attention. A very fine line exists in the secondary intervention realm between ensuring that targeted interventions reach the appropriate populations and ensuring that the intervention does not create a whole host of other problems for the receiving community. The targeted interventions in the secondary intervention model may include the use of validated risk assessment instruments to predict risk of violence, individual needs, and responsivity to programming. Again, in considering the use of validated risk assessment tools, caution must be exercised to ensure that specific communities or populations are not being profiled. The use of these tools is always subject to scrutiny because there is a persistent call for a greater use of evidence-based tools, but there are ongoing critiques that these tools are inherently biased, suggesting that their deployment for targeted populations results in stigma. At present, there does not appear to be a tenable solution to this problem. Suppression programs are typically police-driven enforcement campaigns that may include the development of tactics and maneuvering of legal measures to direct, control, and contain gangs through the criminal justice system (Lafontaine et al., 2005; Mellor et al., 2005). Gebo (2016) posited that suppression is squarely in the purview of the criminal justice system where gang members who commit the most violence are targeted for arrest, prosecution, and, where deemed necessary, incarceration. It is in the area of suppression measures that partnerships between the police and community organizations and stakeholders become tenuous at best, volatile at worst. Generally speaking, community organizations are hesitant to endorse 96 police suppression measures and, at least to some degree, often perceive it to be harmful because the focus is to target gang members for arrest, prosecution, and subsequently, incarceration (Gebo, 2016). Therefore, the invocation of suppression measures by police have frequently met with resistance by community organizations who typically provide a caring role. Tita and Papachristos (2010) noted that communities are more likely to buy-in to efforts that have been developed with a framework of public health because the emphasis is on wellness rather than the traditional criminal justice focus of individual blame. Despite the organizational or cultural challenges inherent in multi-agency collaboration, and while there are many conflicting definitional issues and differing theoretical perspectives on the development of gangs, the most widely supported approach in the literature for addressing the gang phenomenon is the use of prevention strategies (Decker & Curry, 2000; Esbensen, 2000; Howell, 2000; Spergel, 1995). The rationale behind prevention over intervention is logically sound; if successful in preventing individuals from joining gangs, the capacity exists to avert a range of potentially serious consequences from the perspective of the individual to the broader society. Despite the fact that violence is enormously expensive in the provision of services after the fact, the political capital rarely exists to fund long-term, sustained prevention programming. When social service organizations are under-resourced and insufficiently mandated, the police overwhelmingly become the default setting when all other elements of the community safety web have failed (Russell & Taylor, 2015). Shelden, Tracy, and Brown (2001) reasoned that community-based programs provide youth with meaningful opportunities, establish healthy attachments to social institutions, and encourage the development of pro-social skills, all of which are crucial to gang reduction. Thornberry, Smith, Rivera, Huizinga, and Stouthamer-Loeber (1999) posited that prevention efforts should be directed at establishing protective factors in youth and families experiencing difficulties and thereby reduce adverse outcomes, including delinquency. These conclusions support the call for a better link between public health and criminal justice in efforts to reduce violence (Gebo, 2016). The reality of developing and implementing effective prevention programming is onerous. Cohen and Osterberg (2018) suggested that to develop an effective and efficient police-based crime prevention model, in consultation with the community, It is necessary for the police to identify and understand the issues that can be addressed through crime prevention. It is also important to have a deep understanding of the specific root causes of the 97 issue(s) that are going to be addressed by the overall crime prevention strategy and the specific programs that will be put in place. To do so requires the police to be able to accurately identify who or what is responsible for the issue(s). Once this is achieved, the police need to identify, if necessary, who can best assist them in successfully addressing the issue(s). The police also need to establish what success will look like and then develop a prevention, education, intervention, or suppression strategy that is supported by theory and research. This stage should be followed by carefully planning and implementing the prevention or intervention strategy, and continually evaluating the design, implementation, and outcomes associated with the strategy, program, or initiative to ensure that it is targeting the right people or location and achieve its intended goals (p.20). In part the result of austerity measures, but also because prevention of criminal activity is not the primary mandate of police, few police organizations have the resources, skills, or expertise to properly evaluate strategies and initiatives, and are therefore unable to determine whether the return on investment is worthwhile, hindered by capacity. Given that so many questions remain unanswered in the gang literature, I recognize that developing and implementing effective gang prevention measures is a lofty undertaking. Nevertheless, the police in the three participating jurisdictions all reported concerted and long-lasting efforts and resources directed at prevention. Literature on Primary Prevention Programs Police-based prevention strategies generally aim to assist young people in navigating the challenges associated with peer group dynamics, such as mentorship programs and programming that forge ‘pro-social' relationships among youth, and may, therefore, be helpful in reducing the likelihood of gang involvement. The use of prevention and intervention strategies that offer support to at-risk youth before they are recruited into a gang or during the early stages of their involvement is widely supported in the literature (Decker & Curry, 2000; Howell, 2010; Totten, 2008; Wyrick, 2006; Wyrick & Howell, 2004). That said, the resources and capacity available to police organizations in their efforts to address at-risk youth, to participate in prevention efforts at the school and community level, and to work with community organizations in intervention programming are quite limited. Moreover, research on the efficacy of these efforts remains sparse with very few gang prevention programs having been subjected to formal evaluations, and those that have undergone evaluations have not routinely been made publicly available. Gang researchers have long expressed concern for the state of evaluation noting that the dearth of evaluation research may mean that program results are overstated or marketed as successes when they actually demonstrate mixed results (Klein, 2001; Wong, Gravel, Bouchard, Descormiers, & Morselli, 2016; Wong, Gravel, Bouchard, Morselli, & Descormiers, 2012). Klein (1995b) 98 suggested that not enough has been done to effectively communicate the lessons learned from prior research findings of ineffective gang programs, which has led to the replication of failed programs. Others have suggested that some programs may be doomed to failure because they lacked sufficient theoretical foundations (Klein & Maxson, 2006; McGloin & Decker, 2010). This is a bit of a conundrum given the lack of theoretical consensus on who joins gangs and why; a question that remains poignant in the literature34. Papachristos (2011) acknowledged the risks inherent in practitioners prematurely heralding program success as this has led to programs being replicated before external evaluations have been either conducted or published. Gravel et al. (2013) suggested that the key to understanding the success and failure of gang control strategies relies heavily on the capacity to improve the quality and quantity of gang program evaluations. Zane, Welsh, and Zimmerman (2016) cautioned that crime prevention research tends to focus on positive results, and for future crime prevention programs to be successful, it is necessary to learn from the lessons of past programs through evaluation and research. Noaks and Wincup (2004) insisted that it is ill advised to change practice based on a single study. They concluded that many opportunities to influence policy were missed due to a lack of systematic and rigorously gained knowledge. While systematic reviews may offer resolution to these issues, there are few sound evaluations from which to draw a sample (Spergel, 2010; Wong et al., 2012; Wong et al., 2016). Gravel, Bouchard, Descormiers, Wong, and Morselli (2013) combed through 284 evaluation reports and were only able to identify 11 programs designed to reduce gang risk or prevent someone from joining a gang that had been evaluated with a scientifically sound methodology (see also Wong et al., 2012). Sharkey, Shekhtmeyster, Chavez-Lopez, Norris, and Sass (2010) suggested that prevention efforts fell short as a result of their failure to adequately recognize schools as an environment ripe for providing early prevention for youth. They argued that schools were the appropriate place to identify those youth at-risk for gang involvement, and that it is important to provide early intervention for those already involved with the gang lifestyle. Gottfredson and Gottfredson (2001) reported that a total of 17,110 prevention activities were 34 Researchers in sociology and criminology have long studied the question of why young people join gangs to understand the possible pathways into gang involvement and to develop measures to prevent and counter this trajectory. Given the focus of this research is on police responses, this issue is beyond the scope of this dissertation. For more information, see the important work of Esbensen, Petersen, Taylor & Freng, 2009; Hennigan, Kolnick, Vindel, & Maxson, 2015; Howell & Egley, 2005; Klein & Maxson, 2006; and Spergel, 1995. 99 listed by principals at 874 US schools that responded to their survey in the National Study of Delinquency Prevention in Schools (NSDPS) and noted that very few had undergone formal evaluation. Lipsey (2009) conducted a meta-analysis of prevention program failures concluding that the failure of many prevention programs often resulted from their inability to actually enroll those youth who needed it the most and who were the highest risk for gang involvement, despite well-intentioned and well-placed programs. That resulted in an ongoing debate between those who suggested that gang prevention programs tended to be overwhelmingly optimistic despite a lack of evidence and those, including Howell (2010), who have concluded that nothing works in the field of gang prevention programs. The fact that a comprehensive review of the current state of evaluation of primary prevention programming has suggested that consensus on the effectiveness of gang prevention and control strategies has not yet been attained (Wong et al., 2016), only reinforces this bleak assessment. Nevertheless, new prevention programs continue to be developed and implemented with fervor across Canada and the US, several of which will be examined below. It should be noted that evidence of effective gang prevention is rare. Much of the prevention response includes widely targeted education programs intended to increase pro-social activities and resilience. In many areas of Canada, prevention type programs have been implemented, though little formal, rigorous evaluation has occurred. Beyond a lack of evaluation, prevention measures face challenges determining the appropriate target population. Yearwood and Hayes (2000) asserted that “prevention is problematic in that it requires accurately predicting who is likely to become a future gang member and an understanding of the exact conditions under which gangs arise” (p. 19-20). Similarly, Esbensen, Osgood, Petersen, Taylor and Carson (2013) concluded that “effective youth violence-prevention programs continue to be few in number; effective youth gang-prevention programs are even rarer” (p.375). Williams and van Dorn (1999) posited that prevention efforts targeting youth at risk for gang membership had not been thoroughly evaluated. Reed and Decker (2002) acknowledged that “gang programs are evaluated too infrequently and evaluated well even less frequently” (p. 11). Fully 20 years later, this remains true with few prevention programs undergoing robust independent evaluation. Klein and Maxson (2006) systematically reviewed 58 gang control programs and found an overwhelming absence of evidence of gang program evaluation. This led the Author’s to conclude that gang programs 100 faced difficulties in identifying clear goals and objectives that created challenges evaluating the effectiveness of programs in achieving their stated goals. Wong et al. (2012) concluded that evaluations of youth delinquency prevention programs that targeted a broad population showed little sign of effectiveness. Maxson (2013) reasoned that the problem of prevention programming was double-edged. Not only was there a paucity of independent program evaluations, but those that had been conducted revealed pitifully few gang prevention programs that generated positive results. Simply put, research in the prevention domain is nearly void of validated studies showing strong treatment effects for gang prevention (Wong et al., 2016; Wong et al., 2012). Given the often general and diffused nature of broad-based prevention programs, there are inherent difficulties in demonstrating specific effects. Indeed, one of the greatest hurdles in designing research projects in the social sciences is the vexing issue of causality. Even attempts to conduct natural experiments in which the researcher assigns the nonexperimental subjects to treatment and control conditions as if it was random have important limitations because the researcher cannot actually manipulate the social world (Dunning, 2008). As will be examined in Chapter Four, participants spoke of police involvement in schools when asked about non-enforcement related police programs. Some officers spoke of the important work of school liaison officers, while others focused on school presentations specifically related to gangs. As such, a review of the literature related to these widely implemented crime prevention programs is necessary. School Liaison Officers In the United States, police officers have served in schools for more than 80 years (Na & Gottfredson, 2011). In the early days of the program, the responsibilities for police officers assigned to schools included observing student behaviour, identifying delinquent or pre-delinquent behaviour, and serving in a counselling capacity. In 1999, the US Department of Justice Office of Community Policing Services (COPS) initiated the ‘COPS in Schools’ grant program, awarding more than $750 million dollars to increase the number of police officers in schools. By 2009, there were more than 17,000 School Resources Officers in the United States (Na & Gottfredson, 2011). The federal ‘COPS in Schools’ program offered two primary objectives; to “encourage working relationships between police and schools, thus bringing the 101 principles and philosophy of community policing directly into the school environment,” and to “assist communities in focusing leadership and resources on the issues related to creating and maintaining a safe school environment” (Girouard, 2001 cited in Na & Gottfredson, 2011 p. 2). In Canada, these officers are sometimes called School Liaison Officers, and the literature suggests that, through this role, police are able to contribute to school safety by creating positive associations and bonds with students who are then more likely to avoid delinquency and to report the delinquency of others to the police or school (Brown, 2006; Na & Gottfredson, 2011). Though definitive information regarding the rollout of this program in Canada could not be found, the Edmonton Police Service asserted that, in their organization, SRO’s have been working in local schools for more than 40 years.35 Police perceptions of the important work of school liaison officers in building relationships with vulnerable students has been noted in various studies across Canada. In Edmonton, for example, Bucerius, Thompson, and Hancock (2016) found that officers in all divisions stressed the importance of School Resource Officers (SROs) for building relationships with younger members of vulnerable communities, including the Somali community. Some SROs stated that they are trying to teach classes or coach sports teams at the schools they are responsible for, which gives them more and better opportunities to engage with the youth “than just sitting in the office” (p.13). Corrado, Cohen, and Davies (2005) posited that SLO programs were believed to have social capital functions by providing informal networks among high-risk students, victims, teachers, administrators, and parents. They further posited that, given the reported widespread fear of intimidation and related bullying in schools, SLOs were well positioned to provide early intervention assistance at the middle school level where the absence of positive family and peer informal networks were associated with increased criminality. The Author’s further suggested that this would likely become increasingly important given the trend toward increased ethnic/racial diversity, lone-parent families, and the apparent negative effect of popular media and social media (Corrado et al., 2005). Proponents believe that School Resource Officers, as they are called in the US, are able to contribute to school safety through the creation of bonds with students, who are then more likely to report delinquency to them. Moreover, the physical 35 https://www.edmontonpolice.ca/CommunityPolicing/FamilyProtection/SchoolResourceOfficers 102 presence of police officers in schools offers the additional functions of surveillance, enforcement, and onsite and readily available first responders in the case of an emergency (Na & Gottfredson, 2011). Brown (2006) concluded that a comprehensive review of the existing literature revealed that very few systematic evaluations of the effectiveness of SLO programs existed. Instead of systematic or quantitative evaluations of the value of SLOs, the research to date tends to focus on the levels of satisfaction felt by students, school administrators, and parents about the presence of police officers in schools (Cohen & Osterberg, 2018). The validity and generalizability of much of the research on SLO’s has been criticized because these studies are frequently internal or only partial evaluations leading researchers to conclude that SLO programs have not been subjected to the rigorous evaluation necessary to reach any conclusions (Brown, 2006; Na & Gottfredson, 2011). It is important to note that in Public Safety Canada’s Crime Prevention Inventory, the SLO program is only one of six crime prevention programs listed as having three or more evaluations. To that end, three police departments in Canada have undergone reviews of their School Liaison Officer program. The Peel Regional Police Service completed one in 2018, the Winnipeg Police Service completed four exploratory/qualitative evaluations in 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2014, and The Toronto Police Service conducted an internal evaluation of their SLO program in 2012 (Cohen & Osterberg, 2018, p.23). The Peel Regional Police Report on SLOs is quite comprehensive using Social Return on Investment (SROI) techniques to measure the dollar value of the program. The elements of their model, methods of evaluation, and assignment of proxy value are extensively detailed in the report, but there are two relevant takeaways to highlight. The first has to do with the theory of change. The Authors of the report stated that, If secondary schools that have safety concerns due to issues such as drug dealing, bullying/cyberbullying, assault, and theft are offered the services of a skilled full-time police officer who engages in prevention and enforcement related activities in and around the school, THEN students will feel safe, be engaged, have a positive educational/academic/school experience, will be deterred from crime, and will not be victimized. They will embark in their young adulthood successfully, while the community surrounding the school will feel safer and the police and criminal justice system will be able to re-allocate resources for other priorities (Duxbury & Bennell, 2018: 228). 103 This theory of change statement articulates the measures of success being assessed through the SROI model. The SROI was calculated by considering the reduction in calls for service by Peel Regional Police, increased job satisfaction for school administrators, reduced fear of victimization among students, criminal justice system resources reallocated for a youth probation officer, and increased employability of SLOs as a result of skills gained during their tenure (Duxbury & Bennell, 2018). The SROI calculations determined that the social and economic return based on the total investment required to run the SLO program in five schools was $660,289.00. The author concluded that the program yielded a total present value of $7,349,301.00. Based on this study, for every dollar invested in the Peel SLO program, a minimum of $11.13 of social and economic value was created (Duxbury & Bennell, 2018). Beyond the SROI calculations, Duxbury and Bennell (2018) noted that the vast majority of the Grade Nine students surveyed felt safer at school because there was a police officer assigned to their school. Moreover, administrators believed that the presence of the SROs made the school and community safer, and that the SLO program bridged the gap, in part, between the community and the school, in that things that occur at school affect the community and vice versa. In addition, administrators felt that the presence of SROs deterred or prevented some students from engaging in criminal behaviour, making poor choices, and provided greater opportunities for a police officer to proactively intervene with rebellious students. The research concluded that all students, regardless of whether they had been previously victimized, reported greater feelings of safety at school and lesser feelings of anxiety and/or stress after the implementation of the SRO program. This finding reinforced the conclusion that the SRO program benefited all students and not just those that had some interaction with an SLO (Duxbury & Bennell, 2018). In Winnipeg, the School Resource Officer program has been evaluated numerous times with the most recent evaluation completed by Kaplan Research Associates in 2014. The primary objectives of the Winnipeg Police Department SRO position were to make schools safer, help students solve their problems, improve relationships between the police and students, and educate students about the law (Kaplan Research Associates, 2014). The secondary objectives for Winnipeg Police Department SRO’s included reducing bullying and other forms of violence at school, improving students' behaviour at school and in the community, reducing graffiti/damage to school property and in the community, reducing students' alcohol and drug use 104 and reducing gang activity at school (Kaplan Research Associates, 2014). The findings in this research were derived from surveys administered in both 2012 and 2013, from students in grades 3 to 6, students in grades 7 to 9, parents, school staff, and administrators. The surveys sought to assess the degree to which the SLOs met the aforementioned primary and secondary objectives. In terms of their core objectives, Kaplan and Associates (2014) found that “almost all respondents positively evaluated the SRO Program’s ability to achieve the program’s core objectives” (p.170). Of note is the necessity to recognize that not all students view police in schools positively, particularly those who are racialized and experience marginalization. This had significant consequences for the Toronto Police Service. In November 2017, the Toronto School Board passed a motion to remove police officers from all schools in the Greater Toronto Area because approximately 10% of students said that the presence of police officers in schools made them feel intimidated, uncomfortable, or that they were being watched in school (Toronto Police Service, 2011). The remainder of the findings about SLO programs in Toronto were generally positive. Students in SLO schools were more likely than students in non-SLO schools to say they felt comfortable talking to police about crime or other school-related problems, more likely to contact police if they were the victim of a crime, and more likely to report that the relationship between students and the police was either good or excellent. Still, it was determined by the School Board Trustees that they needed to mitigate any discriminatory effect of the SLO program, and it was disbanded. The Peel Regional Police Service study noted that Canadians had only a limited knowledge of what SLOs actually did and that a review of the job descriptions of the SLO positions from across Canada indicated that they were expected to be familiar with the law, serve as the school’s public safety specialist, liaise with the community, solve unique problems, educate students on the law, and be a positive role model for students (Duxbury & Bennell, 2018). Given the saturation of police responses regarding the deployment of prevention programming through school liaison officers, an understanding of the breadth of evaluation conducted on Canadian SLO programs is important. Beyond the SLO program, police in all three jurisdictions indicated their organizations are actively engaged in gang and drug focused school presentations. The next section will provide an overview of the Gang Resistance Education and 105 Training (G.R.E.A.T) prevention program that has been delivered to more than 7,000,000 students in the United States. School Presentations - Is G.R.E.A.T. Great? Despite the earlier cautions about the applicability of US based theory and research in the Canadian context, the GREAT program is the most widely delivered school based anti-gang presentation, and the only one that has been subject to numerous evaluations. Given that the school-based presentations being delivered in Abbotsford, Surrey, and Delta have never been evaluated, an examination of the results of GREAT is important. In the US, the GREAT prevention program is a middle-school classroom-based curriculum delivered by trained law enforcement officers. The first version started in 1991 by police officers in Phoenix, Arizona and was offered in a series of one-hour sessions over nine weeks focusing on the effects of drugs, cultural sensitivity and racism, interpersonal and conflict resolution skills and strategies, and decision-making skills (Esbensen, Freng, Taylor, Peterson & Osgood, 2001). The initial GREAT program underwent frequent and rigorous program evaluation with consistent results indicating that the program was failing to produce its intended outcomes (Esbensen et al., 2001). That said, one benefit of the program was it created positive interactions between youth and law enforcement, rather than contact only during suppression efforts (Esbensen et al., 2001; Petersen, 2000). In their evaluation of GREAT, Esbensen et al. (2001) cautioned not to be overly dismissive of prevention strategies, noting that given the low dosage and the general audience targeted by prevention programs, it was important not be overly critical of the effect size necessary to justify the continuance of a program that required limited investment. From the origins of GREAT, researchers and practitioners combined efforts to develop GREAT II, a nationwide school-based gang prevention program with three identified goals; to reduce gang membership, to reduce violence and criminal activity in schools, and to increase positive relationships between youth and law enforcement officers. The number of sessions was increased from nine to 13, and the modified program worked to address risk factors, including “school commitment, school performance, association with conventional and/or delinquent peers, susceptibility to peer influence, involvement in conventional activities, empathy, self- 106 control, perceived guilt, neutralization techniques, and moral disengagement” (Esbensen, 2015, p.380). An evaluation that included a four year follow up with students who had completed GREAT II was more positive about the program’s outcomes concluding that the program was successful in achieving two of its three stated goals. Esbensen (2015) found that participation in the program generated more negative perceptions of gangs, produced improvements in relations between youth and police by generating more positive perceptions of police, and reduced the odds of gang joining across racially/ethnically diverse groups of students by 24%. This effect remained four years post-treatment (Howell, 2019). Overall, GREAT II has been found to be the most successful gang prevention program thus far (Wong et al., 2016). GREAT II is the only universal, broad-based prevention program in the US that has met the criteria to be considered ‘effective’ and ‘evidence-based’ (Howell, 2019). The four criteria required to meet this standard include the conceptual framework of the program, fidelity of program implementation, quality of the evaluation design, and the strength of the empirical evidence supporting its effectiveness (Howell, 2019). Despite its success, GREAT II has its critics, with some scholars concluding that, although the program has demonstrated success in achieving two of its three (modified) goals, there has been no demonstrable success in reducing violence and/or other forms of crime in schools (Maxson, 2013). As a prevention program, given that GREAT II has failed to show success in reducing violence and other forms of criminality, ongoing and continued improvement of the program is necessary (Wong et al., 2016). Wong et al. (2016) made three recommendations for the field. First, in developing objectives for gang prevention programming, consideration should be given to what can be realistically expected from these types of programs. Wong et al. (2016) noted that the objective to reduce gang activity included in the first GREAT program was likely too lofty for a nine hour, once per week program. In GREAT II, the objective was redesigned to a focus on reducing gang membership, which is more consistent with the capacity of the program (Wong et al., 2016). Second, the over-reliance on expert opinion and conventional wisdom, rather than sound theory, has been forwarded as a primary reason for the past failures of gang prevention programs. Wong et al. (2016) suggested there was limited scope in gang prevention programming to elicit change on issues as complicated as the decision or the root cause for joining a gang. Finally, gang prevention programming is being hastily implemented as a result of media and political pressure. 107 The result is program design absent of a well-designed evaluation component combined with the hasty replication of programs elsewhere without evaluated efficacy and with notably weak theoretical foundations (Wong et al., 2016). In sum, “much work is still needed in the field of gang membership prevention” (Wong et al., 2016, p.144). It must be noted that one of the primary critiques of all school-based gang prevention programming has been the potential that they are targeting the wrong population (Klein & Maxson, 2006; Maxson, 2013). Given that the sociological evidence indicates that school commitment and performance are significant risk factors for adolescent youth, the fact that the program is delivered only in the school environment and does not sample from adolescents who are not in school is problematic. Klein and Maxson (2006) argued that the vast majority of students that participated in GREAT II would not have been likely to join a gang even in the absence of the intervention. This issue of sampling continues to raise doubts concerning the validity of the program’s ability to decrease gang membership (Klein & Maxson, 2006). Despite this, Maxson (2013) posited that given the cost-effectiveness of the program, any positive and significant effect should serve as positive evidence that the GREAT II program had an effect on reducing gang membership. The Potential for Iatrogenic Effects in the Literature Beyond the general inability of prevention programs to empirically establish success, broad prevention programs have also demonstrated negative effects. There exists a body of research that offers a strong caution concerning the potential for harm in these types of programs. These potential harms are known as iatrogenic effects and have the opposite effect from what was intended. In gang prevention programming, there may be iatrogenic effects when youth who are at lower risk are placed in a program with aggressive or antisocial youth and subsequently demonstrate increased aggression and deviancy – a phenomenon called deviancy training (Dishion, McCord, & Poulin, 1999; Hennigan, Kolnick, Tian, Maxson, & Poplawski, 2010). Zane et al. (2016) argued that McCord’s work on the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study36 provided some of the earliest evidence of the iatrogenic effects of programming. They noted one potential explanation for these effects is ‘peer contagion,’ and posited a relationship of mutual 36 The Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study was a longitudinal study of 506 boys that began in 1939 and was focused on delinquency prevention. 108 influence between peers in which learning about deviancy reinforced anti-social behaviours and emotions and provided motivation for future deviant behaviour. They contended that ‘contagion’ was used to describe this process due to its resemblance to the contagious transmission of disease (Zane et al., 2016). Since McCord’s research, a body of empirical work has emerged asserting that unrestricted interaction between low- and high-risk youth contributed to higher rates of deviant behaviour among low-risk youth. This hypothesis has been supported by extensive empirical research (Zane et al., 2016). The ignored possibility of the potential harm of social interventions suggests that much more independent and robust evaluation of these types of programs is necessary (Zane et al., 2016). An example of this is the D.A.R.E program, where after 20 years of the police delivering this program, none of the numerous methodologically rigorous evaluations have found any reduction in drug use among participants. In fact, there is some indication that participation in the D.A.R.E program may have iatrogenic effects in that students in suburban schools who had been through the D.A.R.E program had a slight increase in drug use compared with non-program students (National Research Council, 2001; Rosenbaum & Hanson, 1998). The cautionary tale is clear; prevention programming not grounded in sound criminological theory and implemented with fidelity to the intended model are unlikely to succeed and may, in fact, do more harm than good (Zane et al., 2016). Given that there is little agreement on a given criminological theory of gang involvement, policymakers are placed in a very difficult position in developing and implementing effective programming. That said, it is relevant for those developing policy and practice to be acutely aware of the potential for iatrogenic effects of the social programs intended to repair harm, rather than cause it. At the broadest level, gang prevention programming is often hindered by a lack of theoretical foundation, inadequate school engagement, the inability to target those youth who are at highest risk for gang involvement, the challenge of effecting both attitudinal and behavioral change, and the risk of iatrogenic effects through deviance training and contagion. Lafontaine et al. (2005) noted that prevention programs have not traditionally been the primary focus of law enforcement agencies, whose attention and resources were more commonly devoted to intervention and suppression strategies. The police organizations in all three jurisdictions examined in this dissertation were actively engaged in school presentations and have yet to engage in any kind of evaluation programming. 109 Community Engagement Forums In Abbotsford, Delta, and Surrey, police participants indicated that broad community engagement, including community forums focused specifically on gangs, were being mobilized to establish relationships, build trust, and educate citizens. Though none of the participants that spoke of these initiatives referenced any specific literature, an overview of the literature that considers the utility of such engagement from a public health perspective is offered here. This is done so as to provide context for the community-specific information to be examined in subsequent chapters of this dissertation and to lend support for these types of Public Health engagement strategies, which become the focus in Chapter Seven. There has been an emphasis on a community-led approach in addressing the social determinants of health (Amobi, Plescia, & Alexander-Scott, 2019). This approach emphasizes the need for policy makers and public health leaders to shift their organizational cultures and shared understanding about what it means to have authentic community engagement. Proponents focused on community engagement noted that efforts motivated to provide individual services and support were important but were generally limited in that they did not fully address the factors that affected the health of entire communities (Amobi et al., 2019). Amobi et al. (2019) posited that for organizations that had not conducted significant community engagement, a good first step included being intentional in efforts to build relationships with community members. To do this requires having conversations with trusted community leaders across the stakeholder groups, including education, the faith community, and local business where the primary objective is the development of good working relationships and an understanding of each other’s goals and objectives (Amobi et al., 2019). This may seem fairly simple; however, the execution of this approach is a substantial task requiring the right kinds of people present at the table. Mangan, Thomas, Davies, and Gasper (2018) posited that collaborations were often sites of contestation and struggle consisting of individuals from different agencies and community groups with varied agendas and backgrounds, often facing multiple forms of governance and accountable for targets and standards that could be conflicting and incompatible. Short (1985) suggested that because the correlates of risk for youth violence cut across domains, including a variety of community interventions, and that these must be wide-ranging, addressing the individual, group, and community levels is in keeping with a public health approach. Moreover, 110 they posited that the communities involved are often fragmented, consisting of disparate and unequal groups struggling to balance conflicting demands and highlighting the power relations that underpin efforts in collaboration (Mangan et al., 2018). This is further problematized because power relations within the collaboration are asymmetrical with police having a greater ability to influence agendas, procedures, and outcomes (Skogan, 2006). The result is that genuine collaborations where there was a co-construction of meanings by a variety of actors and where power relations were balance were extremely rare (Mangan et al., 2018). Traditionally, police-public partnerships have been perceived as antithetical to meanings of police work and core policing identities (Davies & Thomas, 2008). This is often because police and community residents often have divergent interests with the police facing conflict over their priorities as determined by intelligence gathered through police informants compared with the issues raised by residents (Mangan et al., 2018). Though challenging, these collaborations offer a productive function for police organizations. Not surprisingly, research has shown that community members were more likely to be positively mobilized around issues related to criminal justice if the concerns were framed as a public health issue, rather than directly focused on crime (Gebo, 2016; Welsh, Braga, & Sullivan, 2014). Lynch and Jackson argued that when looking to better understand community-based violence prevention initiatives, it is advantageous to use a public health approach, as this perspective empowers communities to view violence as an issue within their control and to develop strategies that are sensitive to specific community constraints (2019, p.67). Focusing specifically on gangs in asserting the utility of a public health approach, Gebo argued that “combining public health and criminal justice approaches illuminates the gaps in knowledge, and perhaps suggests that to properly situate the problem based on what we know about gangs, we need to more closely align prevention of youth violence with gangs” (2016, p.379). It should also be noted that prevention and intervention programs are considered desirable for local governments and community officials because they offer ways to be proactive in addressing gangs, such as gang prevention programs offered in schools, rather than being more reactive and arguably involving much more expensive police responses of intervention and suppression (Wong et al., 2016). Moreover, actively engaging the community in the production of responses to violence had the corollary benefit of increasing resources for police through the intensification of efforts from partner agencies, as well as increasing public engagement. This 111 also resulted in a greater willingness to advocate time and resources to address community issues (Nowell & Boyd, 2014). Roman, Klein, and Wolff (2018) attempted a meta-analysis of the quasi-experimental designs for community-level public health violence reduction interventions noting the increasing trend towards the development of police and community-based partnerships to increase the capacity for change. The result was the development of violence prevention and intervention programming directed at the community level (population) that required an understanding of the social context of the at-risk behavior. The outcome was targeting efforts towards both the individual and the community drawing on strategies designed to change the community-level culture of the harmful behavior (Roman et al., 2018). These types of prevention strategies, in both the fields of public health and criminal justice, have theories of change that anticipated outcomes beyond the specific set of individuals targeted for intervention. Through the public health model, at the aggregate-level and by design, they targeted the entire community, thereby eliminating the concerns often noted related to specific intervention or suppression strategies related to further marginalization of entire communities. The theory of change in these programs often encapsulated numerous components designed to complement each other, such as “direct intervention with high-risk youth, media activities, and the building of police and community-based partnerships to increase capacity for change” (Roman et al., 2018, p.156). Community Safety Partnerships Community Safety Partnerships (CSP’s) will be examined here in consideration of their importance as a component of a broader gang intervention strategy known as wraparound. The discussion of CSP’s is included in prevention programming and consideration of this strategy is also important for the discussion around the potential for police and public health partnerships that is the focus of Chapter Seven. Though CSP’s vary widely in form and function, they have become popular as a result of several factors, including the increasing costs of policing despite significant declines in crime rates and the concurrent expansion of the role of police in providing resources and response when community social service resources have been cut or scaled back (Coleman & Cotton, 2010). Russel and Taylor (2015) noted that these partnerships are the result of municipalities seeking better ways to strengthen community safety and well-being, reduce the demand for emergency response, minimize harm, and manage the costs of policing. Though there is no accepted universal definition of CSP’s, the genesis of CSP’s occur at the local level in 112 response to community concerns related to crime and disorder and based on the local context in which they are defined (Edwards & Hughes, 2012). Regardless of its specific form, CSP’s are, at their foundation, focused on community safety and wellness and are collaborative and risk-driven (Russell & Taylor, 2015). CSP’s were first introduced in the UK in response to the 1998 Crime & Disorder Act with the stated intent of these partnerships to identify, prevent, and respond to local crime and disorder priorities through an ongoing and organized partnership between the police and other first responders, health and social service authorities, non-profit organizations, and probation services (Peters & Cohen, 2017). Police resources are allocated for reactive policing efforts including responding to calls for service and investigating crime and, as a result, police organizations often lack the necessary resources to be proactive in responding to social issues. Bhayani and Thompson (2017) posited that “Canadian research has consistently demonstrated that contact with police for social issues such as substance abuse, poverty, homelessness, and mental health exceed those that are considered chargeable offences by a ratio of about 5 to 1” (p.168). These expanded police roles represent the expectation that contemporary police organizations will do more with less (Bhayani & Thompson, 2017). Coleman and Cotton (2010) argued that, in Canada, “contemporary policing requires problem-solving of social issues in consultation and collaboration with the parties involved and/or with other human service agencies” (p.75). Peters and Cohen argued that the development of partnerships between law enforcement and other agencies is based on a recognition that crime problems are generally caused by a myriad of social issues; the complexity of these issues reduces the likelihood that police agencies can effectively address them without external assistance (2017, p.572). CSP’s across Canada have taken a number of forms, including Situation Tables throughout Ontario, Interagency Case Assessment Teams to address domestic violence, and replications of the Prince Albert HUB model across Canada, including the SMART table in BC. In Saskatchewan, Prince Albert’s Police Chief Dale McFee visited Scotland in 2010 to better understand their multi-sectoral strategy known as the Scotland Violence Reduction Unit (McFee & Taylor, 2014; Nilson, 2014). McFee subsequently developed a community safety model in which social service agencies and frontline workers meet twice weekly for 1½ hours to discuss prominent and emerging issues in the community. The HUB focuses on timely identification of individuals and families at risk and draws on the combined expertise of community agencies in an effort to address complex social situations before they become policing problems (BC, 2014). 113 This is known as the Prince Albert HUB model and has since been replicated in communities across Canada, including in Surrey. The Surrey Mobilization and Resiliency Table (SMART) is the 56th HUB model implemented in Canada and is a collaborative and proactive design intended to develop and reinforce a series of relationships across service providers with an identified common set of goals focused on improving community safety and well-being. Bhayani and Thompson (2017) reviewed the outcomes of 83 situations where the SMART table provided a response to individuals experiencing Acute Elevated Risk (AER). Bhayani and Thompson (2017) found that 40% of referred clients were successfully connected with community services that lowered their overall risk of harm. Given that the Surrey SMART table emerged from one of the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Crime Reduction (2014) indicating that there existed a significant need to strengthen interagency collaboration, the success that has been demonstrated thus far is promising (BC, 2014). In efforts to address issues of domestic violence where risk of serious harm or lethal violence exists, police in several jurisdictions across BC have implemented Interagency Case Assessment Teams (ICAT) (BC, 2014). The police identify potential ICAT cases and relevant information about the victim and suspect is shared with partner agencies. At the next ICAT meeting, the data is reviewed, a level of risk is determined, and a report is created. The response includes an enhanced safety plan for the victim as well as a monitoring and support plan for the suspect and other proactive interventions (BC, 2014). The Blue Ribbon Panel on Crime Reduction (2014) concluded that though there were examples of effective interagency partnerships in some communities, persistent and significant gaps in interagency collaboration remained. The report recommended that “Provincial and Municipal governments should actively work to break down bureaucratic silos, remove non-legally required barriers to information-sharing and concerted action, and promote greater and more effective cooperation” (The Blue Ribbon Panel on Crime Reduction, 2014, p.15). To date, community safety partnerships in BC have only really been mobilized specifically focused on gangs as a component within the Surrey wraparound and Abbotsford wraparound programs, which is examined in Chapter Six. That said, understanding the foundation of these multi-agency situation tables for collaboration is important in understanding the potential both for broader 114 police engagement with the community service organizations tasked with providing the services necessary for a productive and functioning social safety net and efforts towards a broader police and public health approach examined in Chapter Seven. Surveillance Cameras In Chapter Six, police use of surveillance cameras specifically in gang prevention efforts will be considered. Therefore, a brief consideration of the research on CCTV as a broader crime prevention tool is important. Video surveillance is believed to deter crime because of the perceived certainty of punishment. Welsh and Farringdon (2004) conducted a meta-analysis of research evidence from both the US and UK on the effects of CCTV on crime in public spaces. They concluded: CCTV had a significant desirable effect on crime, with an overall reduction in crime of 21 per cent in experimental compared to control areas. CCTV was most effective in reducing crime in car parks, most effective when combined with improved street lighting and targeted at vehicle crimes, and more effective in reducing crime in the U.K. than in North America. (2004, p. 21). In 2017, Alexandrie reviewed seven research studies using randomized design techniques and found that total crime reduction in areas with surveillance cameras ranged from 24% to 28% in public streets and urban subway stations. However, he reasoned that there were potential concerns with the effects of displacement and highlighted the importance of integrating police patrols with video surveillance. The opening vignette of this thesis described the Bacon residence as being only a short walk away from my own home during the years that my children were born. The Abbotsford Police Department, as part of their public safety, strategy mounted an overt surveillance camera pointed directly at the front door of the Bacon residence (Bolan, 2009a). That strategy, as well as other more recent iterations, will be examined in Chapter Six. Anti-Gang Media Campaigns The creation and proliferation of Anti-Gang Advertisements is a commonly mobilized response among policing organizations (Chapel, Peterson, & Joseph, 1999). As will be examined in Chapter Six, the Abbotsford Police Department, the CFSEU-BC, and the Surrey Gang Enforcement Team have all engaged in anti-media gang campaigns. As such, a consideration of the existing literature is important despite the fact that the research is based in the US. Anti-Gang public media campaigns are created and maintained by the police, but the media is undoubtedly instrumental in these efforts. Chapel et al. (1999) noted that the 115 effectiveness of anti-gang advertisements had not been thoroughly researched but were based on the success of other police driven public advertisements, such as drinking and driving campaigns. Chapel et al. (1999) studied on the effectiveness of anti-gang media campaigns were conducted with youth aged 12 to 17 years old who were identified gang members or at high-risk for gang membership. The results indicated that anti-gang advertisements were most influential when the source of the ad was a gang member. Ironically, the study reported that the youth participants did not perceive the advertisements to be of direct benefit to them, but all participants, including active gang members, felt that children younger than them would benefit from the messages to avoid becoming involved in gangs (Chapel et al., 1999). The research of Greyson and Johnson (2016) examined the ways in which information affects behavior and argued that when prevention advertising campaigns are multi-level, such as on television, in public transit, and in public bathrooms, and widely disseminated, it may fail to be associated with any significant change in behavior. They suggested that to better understand the effects of advertising on individual behavior, there is a need to investigate the target audience’s experience with the information, including the ways that usefulness and credibility are assessed, and individual sense-making within the context of pre-existing knowledge and beliefs. In Sum: Promising Practices in Primary Prevention Though programming intended to prevent gang violence has existed for nearly 100 years, very few programs have been the subject of any methodologically rigorous evaluation, so there is no best practice in police prevention programming. Promising practices are few and far between and when they are deemed promising, attention paid to program fidelity is critical. Because police have been rendered the policy actors responsible for the development and implementation of gang prevention programming, it is particularly important that there be a recognized emphasis on the utility of evaluation and the use control groups wherever possible. An important consideration when examining the success of prevention strategies includes the degree of effort exerted in determining and locating those most at risk for gang activity. An important finding in the work done by Wong et al. (2012) was that “the more specific the targeted population, the more evaluations tended to show signs of effectiveness” (p.4). One emerging area of promise in mobilizing intelligence to determine those who are most at risk of becoming involved in a gang is the use of social networks that provide information on the quality 116 and quantity of interactions both within and outside the gang. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a theoretical and methodological tool that has as its core premise the notion that individuals are interdependent and that social connections influence attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. It has been suggested that social network analysis may offer a useful tool in predicting who is likely currently involved in gang activity, who is at risk of becoming involved, and, based on contacts, who may become a victim of gang violence. For example, Papachristos, Braga, Piza, and Grossman (2015) analyzed the risk for violent victimization amongst those associated as friends of gang members and concluded that the more connections (known as ties) a non-gang involved individual had to know gang members, the greater their risk for firearms-related violent victimization. Hashimi and Bouchard (2017) proposed ‘Network Capital’ as a network-based target prioritization strategy that simultaneously considered a participant’s network centrality with their crime-affiliated attributes, thereby identifying those who should matter most to police. Mobilizing social network analysis in mapping gang networks may result in improvements to gang prevention efforts by assisting in the identification of those individuals who are most at risk. Literature on Secondary Intervention Strategies Wong et al. (2012) described intervention strategies as ‘gang activity regulation,’ and noted that there were two different philosophies within the types of programs classified as intervention (p.12). The first involved community-based organizations strategically engaging youth who were most at-risk of or were already engaged with gangs and mobilizing to strengthen the preventative or mitigating factors in their social, familial, and school institutions. In their narrative synthesis of 38 evaluation studies, Wong et al. (2012) concluded that strategies typically mobilized by intervention programs include recreational programs, education, job placement, and other supervised activities with positive peers and posited that these types of programs focus on community-based mobilization as targeted secondary intervention programming. The second philosophy of intervention is focused on reducing the occurrence of gang activities through enhanced police presence, engaging in conflict mediation between gangs, providing an environment designed to get young people off the streets at night and during the weekend when they are most likely to be victimized and to commit crimes, and restricting the 117 movements of gang members in criminogenic areas. Punitive formal social control mechanisms, such as police involvement, are rarely present in prevention efforts (Gebo, 2016). Though, at first glance, this philosophy of intervention may seem enforcement oriented, the goal is to reduce delinquency in a model where arrest is seen as a last resort (Wong et al., 2012). Therefore, this type of program would be at the far end of the intervention spectrum bordering and crossing over into tertiary suppression strategies. Existing Gang Intervention Programs in Canada Across Canada, independent evaluations of intervention programs have been difficult because funding for evaluations are often not built into the proposals or the programs. As noted by Wong et al. (2012), the lack of rigorous program evaluation across both Canada and the US makes commenting on the effectiveness of programs very difficult. This issue is compounded because programs without evaluations demonstrating success can negatively affect the likelihood of receiving additional funding to continue, sustain, or expand. One outcome of the lack of evaluations is the lack of data supporting the long-term outcomes of anti-gang initiatives (Mellor et al., 2005). That said, there are a variety of intervention programs that have been developed and implemented across the country, though formal evaluation outcomes are not available. Three intervention programs will be examined here; two are offered in Edmonton and one in Regina. Each of these programs focuses specifically on the Indigenous populations in those communities. Consideration of these programs is important in the context of the question of whether specific programs directed towards the South Asian population in BC are necessary. Despite enormous differences between the experiences of Indigenous populations and the South Asian Diaspora in Canada, an examination of these programs may offer insight into the ways the successes and challenges of these programs may offer insight in the development and implementation of South Asian specific intervention programs. That said, in many cases, the number of participants in the programs reported here is too low to conduct reliable evaluation and, therefore, generalizability remains limited. In Edmonton, the Gang Awareness Intervention Network (GAIN), which was formerly known as the Edmonton Native Alliance (ENA), was established as a grassroots organization comprised of ex-gang members familiar with the gang lifestyle and the specific issues for gang members. Within the program, facilitators used Indigenous spirituality and outreach practices to 118 connect with Indigenous adolescents involved in gangs. The program’s focus was to bridge the gap between youth and community programs, such as safe houses, education, and counselling, whereby that bridge or introduction could serve to assist members in exiting gang life. ENA encompassed Indigenous spirituality, cultural values, and needs not targeted in other community programs and later developed into GAIN, a privately funded initiative designed to promote a family-oriented, healthier, more productive, and drug-free lifestyle for Indigenous youth. The objective of GAIN was to reconnect Indigenous youth with their traditional culture to deter them from becoming involved in gang activity. The GAIN program included drug counselling, court advocacy, and school appearances (Stevens, 2005). The Keepers of the Fire gang intervention and diversion program for at-risk youth was created in September 2009 at the request of the Edmonton Police Service (EPS). The Native Counselling Service of Alberta took the lead in developing the program grounded in an Indigenous-specific theoretical framework, such as the belief that the more connected a youth is to their family, community, and the natural environment, the more resilient they will be. The target population included youth aged 11 to 17 years old who had a history of involvement in low-level criminal activity, such as assaults, robberies, and drug trafficking offences. The youth also had to exhibit gang-related behaviour, such as wearing colours and engaging in gang-like activities. The program created a ‘Circle of Support’ around youth, individually tailored to meet their needs with the intended outcomes of participation in recreational activities, increased attendance at school, and connecting youth to Indigenous culture. Erickson, LaBoucane-Benson, and Hossack (2011) examined five case studies of youth involved in the program and recommended that program designers focused their attention on learning from the youth and frequently adapting the program to meet the youth's needs. In Saskatchewan, the Regina Anti-Gang Services (RAGS) was developed in 2007 for gang-involved Indigenous youth and young adults between the ages of 16 and 30 years old. Elements of Multi-Systemic Therapy focusing on the multiple determinants of antisocial behaviour were employed and combined with the Wraparound Process that involved the creation of individualized care plans specific to each participant. The stated goal of the program was to provide the necessary support to enable youth to exit the gang lifestyle successfully. RAGS offered four activities; outreach to schools and institutions, intensive gang exit counselling, life skills programming for young men, and a circle keeper program for young girls. A combined 119 methods program evaluation occurred from March 2008 to January 2011 with results indicating positive changes in the participants’ attitudes following completion, a decline in general approval of aggression and retaliation, and an increase in a dislike of guns. The program evaluation also reported a positive effect in reducing gang affiliation and participants’ involvement in nonviolent crime (Totten & Dunn, 2011). Despite the laudable intervention efforts in these communities, there is little evidence of the effectiveness of these types of intervention programs. In their narrative synthesis of 38 rigorous gang prevention/intervention strategy evaluations, Wong et al. (2012) concluded that programs focusing on offering alternatives to gang activity were not found to be effective. It should be noted though that they initially set out to do a meta-analysis, but after implementing an exhaustive data extraction and coding process, the Author’s determined that a quantitative synthesis of program outcomes was just not possible given the current state of the literature on gang prevention/intervention. Wong et al. (2012) concluded that this was likely the principal reason why no published meta-analysis on street gang prevention and intervention programs existed. The dearth of empirical data on gang prevention and intervention efforts remains a significant concern as policy responses continue to be developed and implemented and policy transfer of programming from other jurisdictions continues without any evidence of success. Desistance and Exiting For those already participating in gang activity, the intervention strategy becomes disengagement. These strategies are based on the idea that offering alternatives to gang activity assists gang members to behave in more prosocial ways by allowing them to break ties with their gang and successfully work their way back into the conventional world (Lafontaine et al., 2005). Depending on the degree of gang involvement, disengagement can be difficult to achieve. Spergel (1995) argued that the more entrenched the gang member, the less likely it was that he or she would be able to leave the gang. Esbensen (2000) suggested that the more risk factors present in a young person’s life, such as low income, early violence, anti-social beliefs, and low academic achievement, the more difficult it may be to leave the gang. Maturation through age, the formation of social bonds, attaining gainful employment, or having children might be used to explain the process of gang desistance (Juhasz, 2019). 120 Research by Decker et al. (2014) concluded that many former gang members believed that neither the criminal justice system nor social service agencies influenced their decision to leave the gang. Instead they suggested that the discrepancy between one’s expectations of the gang lifestyle and their reality in the gang was a primary factor in desistance from gang activity. They posited that individuals joined gangs in the hopes of finding wealth, protection, and familial support. Desistance becomes more likely when the individual realizes that these expectations will likely not come to fruition (Decker et al., 2014). For instance, when protection is the expectation, but risk of lethal violence is the reality, some individuals become disillusioned. This may be compounded by the realization that wealth and prosperity are unlikely long-term outcomes. Decker et al. (2014) posited that desistance occurs through frequent and repeated discontent with unmet expectations and suggested that by providing at-risk youth with information on the realities of gang life, there may be an opportunity to encourage or foster early disillusionment that may serve as a protective factor against serious gang involvement. Sports Programs There exists a body of literature suggesting that participation in sports can serve as a deterrent to juvenile delinquency (Taylor, Nanney, Welch, & Wamser-Nanney, 2016). This is intuitive and conforms to several theories of delinquency, including Hirschi’s Social Control Theory where sport provides the opportunity for the development of normative prosocial bonds with institutions and leaders or coaches. This premise is further supported by the suggestion that the time and effort necessary for participation in sports results in less time for a youth to associate with delinquent or gang members or to engage in gang-related activities. Still, participation in sports is, by no means, a guarantee that young people will not join gangs (Taylor et al., 2016). Because these sports programs are not broad-based and available to everyone, with participants specifically targeted based on risk, they are included in the intervention category in the literature. It is important to recognize that though these programs are intuitively positive, there is the possibility for negative outcomes if the program provides an opportunity for at-risk youth to come together in social groups in the absence of significant positive prosocial influences (Rorie, Gottfredson, Cross, Wilson, & Connell, 2011). Several studies have shown that antisocial children tended to affiliate with one another (Handwerk, Field, & Friman, 2000; McCord, 1992). 121 Grouping high-risk young adolescents together, even with adult supervision, has the potential of exacerbating antisocial behaviour because when delinquent youth are grouped together, delinquent behaviour is reinforced more frequently than it is with non-antisocial children (Handwerk et al., 2000; McCord, 1992). Some scholars have noted that when prevention and intervention programs bring together anti-social youth, the potential for negative outcomes exist through ‘deviancy training.’ (Dishion, McCord, & Poulin, 1999). In fact, there is a significant body of research indicating that after school programs, such as those being delivered by police through these sports initiatives, had no positive effect on youth outcomes and, in some cases, produced negative outcomes, including negative peer influence, an increase in conduct problems, and increased substance use in comparison to non-participants (Dynarski, James-Burdumy, Moore, Rosenberg, Deke, & Mansfield, 2014; Mahoney, Stattin, & Lord, 2004). Wraparound The term ‘wraparound’ refers to the collaborative team tailoring the program to meet individual needs. This can result in significant investments in case management rather than placing at-risk youth into a ‘one size fits all’ program (Linden, 2010). Both police and school staff are able to make referrals if a young person exhibits any number of risk factors for gang involvement. The wraparound team is entrusted with designing, implementing, and monitoring an individualized plan (Bruns, 2008). Wraparound programs have been difficult to assess from an evidence-based perspective because there is little program fidelity and consistency, the programs continually evolve, and the model is differentially applied across geographical locations depending on the context and population of concern (Dub, 2018). Suter and Bruns (2009), in their efforts to evaluate wraparound style programs, concluded that the majority of evaluation studies lacked comparison groups and very few studies used experimental or quasi-experimental designs. They concluded that empirical evidence on the wraparound process demonstrated only modest levels of effectiveness and did not meet the strict criteria to qualify as an evidence-based treatment. The efficacy criteria required for a program to be designated as evidence-based treatment requires positive findings emerging from a minimum of at least two independent evaluations with sound experimental design. Suter and Bruns (2008) noted that the studies included in their meta-analysis failed to include sufficient information regarding the duration, frequency, and fidelity in 122 the program evaluation and also failed to include sufficient information about program participants. The results of this meta-analysis demonstrated again the need for rigorous evaluation of gang intervention programming. In Sum - Promising Practices in Secondary Intervention Given the ongoing and ever-increasing expectations of fiscal accountability in policing, it is essential to understand which intervention programs do not work to allocate limited financial resources wisely and to avoid iatrogenic effects. Strategies that have been found to be ineffective and sometimes even harmful include instructional programs that focus on information dissemination and fear arousal, counselling students, particularly in peer groups, and after-school programs combining groups of at-risk youth that allow for deviancy training (Dishion et al., 1999; Hennigan et al., 2010; Mathys, Hyde, Shaw & Born, 2013). When considering the potential for secondary intervention programming, the critical insight is that life-course trajectories can shape future criminal offending trajectories, and that these pathways can be altered through intervention (Sampson & Laub, 2016). As with promising practices in primary interventions, it is imperative that federally funded secondary intervention initiatives receive the guidance and resources necessary to ensure that appropriate and methodologically rigorous evaluations can occur, and that these findings are publicly disseminated. Doing so will ensure the development of an evidence base upon which programs can be improved and to assure program fidelity and appropriate implementation for new programs across Canada. Literature on Gang Suppression Strategies Beyond any proactive police involvement in prevention and intervention, the role of suppression lies squarely with the police as the frontline component of the criminal justice system. Suppression efforts are primarily police-based approaches that seldom include partners from prevention and intervention programs (Klein & Maxson, 2006). Specialized policing units that specifically target gang members and their activities have been operating in North America since the 1960’s in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other urban centres (Katz & Webb, 2006; Ransford, Kane, Metzger, Quintana, & Slutkin, 2010; Spergel, 2007). It appears that the first body of literature on police responses to gang violence came out of Chicago, where the Chicago Police Department created its first taskforce to respond to gang violence in 1967 (Katz & Webb, 2006). Later, in the 1980s, many police departments in the US established specialized units for 123 gang control known as ‘police gang units' that served as a second division within a police organization (Katz & Webb, 2006). In the local context, the first police suppression unit in BC was formed in 1989 by the Vancouver Police Department, known as the VPD Gang Crime Unit (GCU) (VPD, 2010). Katz and Webb (2006) suggested that the creation of specialized gang units is seen, in part, as a symbolic act to indicate to the community that the police department was committed to taking the gang problem seriously (Katz & Webb, 2006). The VPD (2010) noted that “since that time, the GCU has maintained a present in Vancouver as a relentless, ever-present element in the fight against gang crime” (p.7). In 2002, the province of BC established the Indo-Canadian Gang Task Force with a mandate to address gang violence in that community (Gravel et al., 2018). The task force was disbanded in 2004, only to be reinstated in 2005 as the BC Integrate Task Force (IGTF) with the same mandate as the previous task force, namely “to address concerns from the Indo-Canadian community about murders of young Indo-Canadian men” (Gravel et al., 2018, p.260). These specialized gang units received formal training in the processes and procedures to target and suppress youth gangs (Spergel, 2007). Additionally, departments argued that the creation of specialized units increased their effectiveness by enabling officers to develop highly technical skills through training and experience that would otherwise be impossible (Katz & Webb, 2006). In 2007, as public concerns related to gang violence continued to increase, the VPD announced the creation of the Uniform Gang Task Force that would be eventually combine into a taskforce under the same name operating from under the CFSEU-BC umbrella (Gravel et al., 2018). In 2009, the city of Surrey created its own Gang Task Force known as SGET. In 2010, the Abbotsford Police Department formed the Gang Suppression Unit (GSU). This was later disbanded (due to resourcing constraints) and revived again in 2019 (Mangat, 2015). Greene and Pranis (2007) argued that the proliferation of these specialized police gang units was justified as a needed response by police to the growing public concerns over gang crime. The targeting of specific gang members by the criminal justice system was a second popular police response to localized gang problems. In mobilizing suppression strategies, police used targeted patrols, surveillance, intelligence gathering, database creation and maintenance, and arrests to suppress gang activity (Greene & Pranis, 2017; Katz & Webb, 2006). Kennedy (1997) reasoned that the overall idea was to create a credible deterrence threat against gangs. The intent was that police increased the certainty and swiftness of punishment in a number of 124 innovative ways, thereby deterring specific individuals from criminal behaviour (Kennedy, 1997). Though the primary intent of focused police suppression activities remains deterrence, Greene and Pranis (2017) cautioned that these campaigns tended to result in net-widening that caught gang members and non-members alike. Klein and Maxson (2006) noted that some communities complained about these approaches claiming that these strategies increased incidents of racism by police and police use of force. Bjerraagard (2003) insisted that suppression strategies were without question the most expensive of police responses and argued their lack of efficacy in appropriately addressing the root causes of gang membership. Bjerraagard (2003) also suggested that increasing the enforcement of public ordinances combined with the use of aggressive stop-and-search tactics could reasonably be expected to increase tensions between the police and the broader community whose members who perceived the police targeting the wrong people or engaging in racial profiling. This may result in community members feeling less inclined to cooperate with police rendering the task of law enforcement even more difficult (Greene & Pranis, 2007).37 Other gang researchers have noted the potential for gang suppression programs to backfire in the face of group processes that undermine deterrence messages through status enhancement, building cohesion within the gang, and invoking an oppositional culture by elevating the gang’s importance and reinforcing an us versus them mentality; all of which can lead to increased gang activity (Greene & Pranis, 2007; Klein, 1995a). Katz and Webb (2006) concluded that, although a substantial body of research sought to understand gangs, gang members, and gang crime, very little research has addressed police efforts to control gangs. There is a dearth of research examining police responses to gang violence and the few studies that exist have focused at the macro-level, typically involving paper-based examination of court documents, media accounts, and surveys of police managers (Katz & Webb, 2006). 37 Police are permitted under common law (as confirmed in R. v. Mann, 2004 SCC 52) to stop individuals in certain circumstances, which are commonly referred to as “street checks”. In recent years, the Toronto Police Department has come under scrutiny for perceived abuse of powers when conducting street checks as a result of the disproportionate number of racialized individuals (Tulloch, 2018). In Ontario, provincial regulations have been produced and in Nova Scotia the practice has been banned. A review of the VPD’s street check practices concluded that officers were not racially targeting individuals and were conducting lawful checks (VPD, 2018). As of January 2020, the province of BC has implemented guidelines for “police stops” included in Provincial Policing Standards, the focus of which is bias-free policing and ensuring legal authorization is present to stop individuals and gather information (BC, 2019c). 125 Many scholars caution that the little evidence that does exist points to the potential iatrogenic effects of gang prevention and suppression strategies. Greene and Pranis (2007) suggested that the official response to an emerging gang problem was rarely based on a solid understanding of gang issues or a coherent theory of what an intervention should accomplish. Rather, the thrust of most gang enforcement efforts, including gang injunctions and gang sweeps, run counter to what is known about gangs and gang members, and reinforces negative images of whole communities thereby rendering the efforts ineffectual, if not counterproductive or iatrogenic. This is not to say that there is no value in suppression, as investigation, arrest, and laying charges is a necessary function and expectation of police. However, an understanding of prior research in this area and the potential for iatrogenic effects might be productive for police in ensuring their efforts are not making the situation worse. Suppression strategies often incorporate many facets of the criminal justice system and do not end with the police. The development of specialized gang prosecution units is often used to improve the likelihood of conviction. At the macro-level, anti-gang legislation is also used to suppress gang activity in various ways, including increased sentencing for those who encourage a minor to commit a gang-related crime or increased sentencing for the commission of serious gang-related violent offences (McCorkle & Miethe, 2002). Katz and Webb reasoned that the underlying assumption of the suppression strategy is based on deterrence theory: that swift, severe, and certain punishment will lead to a reduction of gang-related activity among current members, as well as to a reduction in the number of individuals who want to participate in gangs and gang behaviour in the future (2006, p. 11). Much of what we know of deterrence theory points to it being fraught with challenges that are the result of a series of conditional probabilities specific to the nature of the criminal justice system. These include the likelihood of apprehension after the commission of a crime, the likelihood of prosecution after an arrest, the probability of conviction through prosecution, and the probability of sanction when convicted (Nagen, 2013). Given the numerous possibilities for error among these conditional probabilities, the success of deterrence practices remains a matter of contentious debate. Zatz (1987) examined the police response to gang violence in Phoenix, Arizona. Her research used data gathered from court records, media reports, and community members. She argued that the police response to gangs had been a response to moral panic, rather than environmental reality. Her findings demonstrated that a serious gang problem did not 126 exist in Phoenix at the time that the police gang unit was established and posited that police officials constructed the gang problem to obtain funding from federal resources. Spergel and Curry (1990) surveyed 254 police professionals in 45 cities and found that gang suppression tactics involving specialized police units were the most commonly cited strategy in response to gangs. In 2001, Charles Katz conducted fieldwork in Junction City, Kansas and argued the importance of considering the perspective of police. Katz (2001) noted that, in Junction City, the creation of a specialized police gang unit was the result of external pressure from local stakeholders. This conclusion may be important in the local context because, in both Surrey and Abbotsford, the creation of a specialized gang unit occurred after significant public outcry related to gang violence. Abbotsford is particularly interesting because though a gang unit was initially established, it was then disbanded, only to be later resurrected in 2018 (Hopes, 2018). Katz (2001) posited that considering the organizational behavior and institutional perspective of policing might be the more appropriate theoretical framework for understanding police responses to gangs. In 2008, Lemmer, Bensinger and Lagurio analyzed the Chicago Police Department's response to gang violence documenting and analyzing their efforts to organize and re-organize a viable response. This comprehensive study included a fulsome description of the history and life-course of gang violence in Chicago from 1967 through to 2003 and posited that many lessons could be learned about police responses to gang violence. They encouraged police organizations to reorganize in an effort to appropriately suppress and address rising gang violence whenever necessary. Katz and Webb (2006) concluded that generally speaking, the studies on police responses to gangs have been methodologically limited with an absence of reliable quantitative measures and often used anecdotal evidence to make assumptions that failed to include information from police organizations themselves. Displacement Though there is not a literature on the effects of displacement resulting from police gang suppression activities, the literature on crime displacement offers important insight for the effects of such measures on neighboring communities. Crime displacement is the phenomenon of spatial shifting in response to law enforcement intervention (Weisburd, Wyckoff, Ready, Eck, Hinkle, & Gajewski, 2006). Telep, Weisburd, Gill, Vitter, and Teichman posited that 127 the idea of spatial displacement can be traced to early work by sociologists who noted the role of opportunities for crime at places, but at the same time assumed that the concentration of crime prevention efforts at places would simply shift crime events from place to place without any clear long-term crime prevention benefit (2014, p.517). Historically, some scholars have argued that displacement was a real concern of focused police approaches; however, more recent scholarly approaches to hot-spot policing suggested that displacement of crime at the micro-level is an avoidable outcome (Braga et al. 2012; Weisburd et al., 2006). Telep et al. (2014) conducted a systematic review of 20 studies examining the displacement of crime and diffusion of benefits and concluded that crime displacement is an unlikely outcome of police interventions when applied to micro units of geography, such as crime hotspots, single street blocks, or clusters of street blocks with high volumes of crime. Indeed, much of the strongest and most persuasive evidence against the assumption of immediate spatial displacement has resulted from recent studies of focused hot spot police interventions (see Braga & Weisburd, 2012). However, displacement may also occur across larger areas, known in the literature as ‘macro-places’. These include neighborhoods, cities, regions, and even nations. In these macro contexts, displacement involves the movement of crime across administrative, governmental, and social boundaries as a result of larger scale interventions of formal social control, such as large-scale policing strategies or changes in law and/or policy (Telep et al., 2014). Economists have long suggested that the decision by criminals to commit a certain type of crime in a certain place is the result of a rational cost-benefit analysis (Becker, 1968). To this end, costs include the time and effort dedicated to criminal activities, the opportunity cost of not engaging in illegal activities, and the potential or likelihood of sanction by the criminal justice system (Becker, 1968; Teichman, 2005). The benefit is the positive expected value as a result of the commission of crime. In circumstances where the expected sanction rises or the likelihood of detection increases, the perceived net value diminishes and crimes are deterred (Teichman, 2005). This theory is the basis for a well-known crime prevention program, Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (known as CPTED) that includes deterrence measures, such as building fences and increasing levels of street lighting so as to reduce likelihood of victimization. Successful CPTED implementation is unlikely to stop criminal activity, but it theoretically displaces the activity to other areas where rational choice suggests the likelihood of getting caught is lower. With respect to large-scale displacement, Teichman (2005) argued that this can 128 occur as a result of intentional efforts by policing jurisdictions, including increasing the probability of detection, increasing the risk of sanctions, and pushing offenders to neighboring communities noting that “if one jurisdiction raises the price of committing crime within it, either by increasing the sanction or probability of detection, then neighboring jurisdictions become more attractive to crime targets” (Teichman, 2005, p.1834). The overall premise is that concerted and intentional police efforts within a specific jurisdiction could change a criminal’s opportunity costs, thus motivating the offender to displace to a neighboring jurisdiction where sanctions and the likelihood of being subject to them are less severe. Teichman (2005) reasoned that given the costs to communities of crime, there was inherent incentive in adopting policies that were likely to export problems to neighboring communities or at least out of their community. He tempered this by saying that the possibility existed that jurisdictions might adopt policies aimed at reducing crime without realizing that a likely result was displacement. This conclusion is supported in recent research in which 137 chronic offenders were interviewed about their experiences of being ‘thwarted’ by police (Summers & Rossmo, 2019). Respondents noted that increased police enforcement resulted in offenders more likely being displaced than to desist from criminality. The responses of some participants related to the effects of displacement will be examined in greater detail in Chapter Six; however, it is important to also consider the ways in which the “patchwork” nature of policing in the Lower Mainland renders displacement a double-edged sword. The police in one community may find success by displacing crime, particularly gang crime, but the police in that community may also find frustration in the inherently mobile nature of gang activity throughout the Lower Mainland. The multi-jurisdictional movement of offenders in their illicit narcotic sales creates numerous issues for police as will be examined in the sections focused on structural barriers in Chapter Seven. In Sum - Promising Practice in Suppression Strategies Police have been operating in a specific set of ways in response to gang violence including suppression strategies designed to focus on persistent offenders, aggressively enforce laws, and work to increase the likelihood of negative legal sanctions for involvement in gang violence (Chettleburgh, 2002; Klein & Maxson, 2006). Yet, little research supports the effectiveness of these strategies given that specialized gang units have not been subjected to 129 rigorous evaluation (Ransford et al., 2010). Though the statistical results of short-term suppression strategies are quantifiable, easy to measure, and have been deemed successful based on police making numerous arrests, advancing criminal investigations as a result of gang problems, and reducing the number of homicides and shootings in some jurisdictions, suppression is, by and large, not sustainable because it is human resource heavy and requires expensive technological supports (Hennigan et al., 2010; Wong et al., 2012). Beyond resource considerations, the negative effects that stem from aggressive police suppression tactics in often marginalized communities, is frequently counter to policing efforts to establish trust and social capital (Greene & Pranis, 2007). Nonetheless, suppression and enforcement activities fall squarely within the responsibility of police organizations and arguably this is the only area of gang violence that the police are indeed responsible for, as the only actors that can be mobilized in this capacity as they are duty-bound to conduct investigations and execute arrests for criminal behaviour. Policing efforts to respond to gangs have been expensive and arguably ineffective given that gangs continue to flourish (Wood, Alleyne, & Beresford, 2016). However, as with most social phenomena, success is in the eye of the beholder. If the significant and resource intensive police responses have resulted in containment of the issue, that might be considered some degree of success. Unfortunately, given the dearth of empirical data on the nature of gangs over time, determining success at any level remains inherently problematic. The remainder of this dissertation will consider the institutional challenges experienced by police organizations in responding to what Rittel and Webber (1973) coined as ‘wicked problems’. Police organizations across the Lower Mainland have been rendered the policy actors expected to develop an effective policy response and implement the requisite policy tools to prevent and deter gang violence with limited additional resources to do so. Simultaneously, the police are expected to maintain the capacity for the effective response to calls for service. To this end, there is a growing body of research indicating a disconnect between what police agencies are expected to deal with and their ability to do so (Bhayani & Thompson, 2017; Cohen, Plecas, McCormick, & Peters, 2014). Increasingly, there has been recognition that there are no simple policy solutions to certain kinds of complex social problems, and scholars exploring ‘wicked problems’ are working to map, explore, and understand the intricate systems that shape and are 130 shaped by individual behavior (Kurtz & Zavala, 2017). The next chapter will provide an overview of the qualitative methodology and the sources of data used in this dissertation. 131 Chapter 4. Methodology Ricciardelli and Griffiths (2017) argued that there remains a climate of mutual distrust and suspicion between police and academics. There are historical, organizational, and structural reasons why there has been little engagement between police and academic researchers in Canada (Cohen et al., 2014; Gordon, 2000; Griffiths et al., 2014). In an attempt to flesh out the reasons for this disconnect, Griffiths, Murphy, and Snow (2014) interviewed 27 participants, including senior police leaders, government personnel, academics, and other stakeholders. Their findings indicated that respondents were generally pessimistic about the current state of police research. Participants indicated that the absence of funding for police research combined with issues pertaining to the dissemination of findings led to their pessimism. Though progress had been made in BC with the establishment of the RCMP Research Chair in Crime Reduction (Cohen et al., 2014), there is still scant peer-reviewed and/or publicly accessible criminological research on policing strategies and operations across Canada, and a corresponding dearth of reliable data to inform evidence-based policing practice (Huey & Ricciardelli, 2016). This chapter will provide an overview of the approach, the data sources, the data preparation, and the analytic techniques used to generate the findings presented in this dissertation. In an effort to provide a comprehensive analysis of the research questions and to better understand police responses to gang violence in the Lower Mainland, this qualitative exploratory case study methodology involved semi-structured interviews with police officers and civilian employees of police organizations in three Lower Mainland jurisdictions; Abbotsford, Surrey, and Delta. In exploratory research, determining the appropriate methodological framework can be challenging. This research project employs the case study as strategic methodology and takes an interpretive approach that assumes that beliefs and practices are constitutive of one another. Noor (2008) defined a case study as “an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context using multiple sources of evidence” (p.1602). This suggested that case studies are broadly concerned with how and why things happen, examining the difference between what was planned, and the contextual reality of what actually occurred that offers the researcher the opportunity to gain a holistic view of a certain series of events. “Practices could not exist if people did not have the appropriate beliefs” and “beliefs or 132 meanings would not make sense without the practices to which they refer” (Rhodes, 2018, p.4). Moreover, the interpretive approach presumes that meanings and beliefs are holistic and can only be made sense of by locating them within the wider context of other beliefs that are the foundation of the individual’s rationale for maintaining them (Rhodes, 2018). As Geertz (1973) posited, social science needs to be “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (p.5). Interpretive methods are non-prescriptive but tend to hold much greater emphasis on qualitative data collection focused on treating the data as evidence of the meanings or beliefs that are embedded in actions. Within interpretive practices, decentred analysis challenges the notion that impersonal forces drive politics, focusing instead on studying the relevant meanings, beliefs, and preferences of the people involved (Rhodes, 2018). This is achieved by focusing on policy narratives and deriving practical lessons from the lived experiences of the people at the centre of it all. Policy narratives collected as data provide information for policymakers so they can make rational decisions (Rhodes, 2018). Rhodes and Tiernan (2014) suggested that this methodology equates to the interpretive equivalent of evidence-based policymaking. Interpretive theory applied through a strategic case study methodology has been useful, as interpretive methods study the actions and beliefs out of which practices emerge. This study began as a ‘bottom-up’ approach using purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews to ask police about practices in gang activity prevention, intervention, and suppression. What became problematic was how to ascribe meaning. By reviewing documentary sources, including a wide range of media articles, government publications, and additional academic research, I was able to interpret the contextual realities that exist and influence the complex phenomenon of policing gangs in BC’s Lower Mainland. Noor (2008) suggested that incorporating documentary evidence is a means to cross-validate information gathered in interviews that enhance the reliability and validity of the findings. Positionality and Reflexivity Reflexivity has “entered the qualitative lexicon as a way of emphasizing the importance of self-awareness…and ownership of one’s perspectives” (Patton, 2002, p.64). As Denzin posited, “interpretive research begins and ends with the biography and self of the researcher” (1989, p.12). Without question, life experiences have brought me to this point. The approach to 133 this research project is from the unique perspective of having worked in law enforcement alongside police for over one decade. From 2009-2013, I held a position as the Canadian Border Services Agency (hereafter CBSA) liaison officer to the Abbotsford Police Department and the Correctional Service of Canada. My desk was located inside the Major Crimes Unit of the Abbotsford Police Department and I frequently worked alongside the Surrey RCMP on joint projects. Early in this research, I recognized the need to be reflexive when approaching this project, and I endeavored to address my positionality directly so as to avoid what Contreras (2012)38 called a ‘standpoint crisis’ that forced him to, after much criticism, divulge his background. By engaging in full and forthright disclosure of my employment history with gatekeepers and research participants, I was able to avoid uncomfortable or awkward tensions with respect to my way of knowing the lingo and context of policing in the Lower Mainland. The incommensurate comparisons between the ‘insider’ status of being a former drug dealer studying drug dealers and being a former law enforcement officer interviewing law enforcement officers are not lost on me but offer the opportunity to consider the different ways of seeing and knowing in research. Over the course of this study, I was considered, by some, to be a trusted insider, even though I am no longer employed as a peace officer. Bucerius (2013) reasoned that the degree of belonging a researcher achieves is influenced by his or her level of group affiliation, commitment to group values and norms, and level of participation in group activities. Ganga and Scott (2006) posited that interviewing within one's own ‘cultural community’ may afford the researcher a degree of social proximity and increased awareness amongst both researcher and participant of the social divisions that exist between them. Indeed, in this research, participants would sometimes say “You remember when?” and speak of shared experiences or start a sentence with “when you were at APD” and speak of a temporal period or event that we shared. In some cases, it became clear to me when re-reading the interviews that some study participants may have thought I had previously worked as a police officer for Abbotsford rather than the CBSA liaison officer, though this was not clear to me during the interview. This is in line with Ganga and Scott’s (2006) argument that one’s insider status can, in some cases, take on an added 38 Contreras (2012) conducted ethnographic qualitative research in the Bronx with Dominican drug dealers having been a former member of that community himself. 134 degree of importance when the research involves social interactions between a researcher and a participant from within a shared imagined community. Given that many research participants likely shared more information with me than they would normally share with an ‘outsider’, along the aforementioned negative and backlash effects that could stem from this information should confidentiality protocols be breached, I remain vigilant in protecting their confidentiality and ensuring that I represent their voices and views accurately. Mao, Akram, Chovanec, and Underwood (2016) noted that researchers are expected to continuously and actively engage in critical reflection throughout the entire research process. This begins with the process of identifying the research problem and questions, gathering information, analyzing and interpreting findings, and writing the research. Ganga and Scott (2006) suggested that insider interviews of this type could sometimes create a distinct social dynamic, whereby differences between researcher and participant are brought into focus as a result of shared cultural knowledge. I approached this with caution recognizing that my former insider status may have promoted a level of familiarity and offered a level of access not normally afforded to academic researchers. Moreover, my lived experience undoubtedly affects the potential for bias, a limitation that I remain cautious and cognizant of. The fact that it took only three weeks to gain access to three distinct police organizations was likely a result of my former insider status. I must acknowledge that maintaining this relationship of trust may have had an effect on the types of questions I asked and the ways I interpreted the answers participants provided. Conflict of Interest Beyond influencing the types of questions asked, my continued relationship within these organizations has undoubtedly influenced what I have written about in this dissertation. The interviews for this project were completed in November 2017. The following year, I was hired as a co-investigator by the Delta Police Department to develop a Crime Prevention Model with Dr. Irwin Cohen. In 2019, Dr. Cohen and I were again hired by Delta Police Department to conduct a review of their analysts and Intelligence Section. Since completing the interviews for this project in 2017, I have done numerous additional research projects partnered with police organizations in the Lower Mainland. In the course of those research projects, I came to know and understand more about police responses to the ever-changing gang landscape in the Lower Mainland. Since 135 2017, I have conducted numerous interviews with police officers in Delta, Surrey, and Abbotsford, as well as various other Lower Mainland policing detachments and organizations, for various with project funding through the Centre for Public Safety and Criminal Justice Research at the University of the Fraser Valley where I am employed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. In my role at UFV, I am expected to engage with law enforcement organizations in community building, as well as advisory and consulting capacities. To this end, I sat as the UFV representative on the West Abbotsford Youth Action Group (WAYAG)39 for the final year of its existence. Ongoing and subsequent research projects, both paid and funded as research releases through my current employer, though not a part of this project, continue to influence my perspective and understanding of these issues. Those additional interviews were not covered by the ethics for this research project and, as such, I do not include the specifics of those learning moments in this dissertation. Moreover, throughout my time working with police as a researcher, there have been countless instances of ‘off the record’ conversations during which I learned much more than I included in this dissertation about the structural barriers inherent in policing the Lower Mainland and the challenges police face in their efforts to address gang violence. I intend to continue research with police agencies throughout my career and, as such, I was very cautious here not to betray confidences and to compartmentalize my knowledge and understanding to include only the data collected for this dissertation. While my knowledge of gangs in BC and the police’s responses to them has continued to expand, only the information collected under UBC BREB Certificate H16-02371 has been included in the findings of this research. The paid consulting work done for Delta Police Department, from which I benefitted financially, was declared to the UBC Department of Geography as well as the office of ethics at UBC, and no conflict of interest was found. Given the tenuous nature of the relationship between academics and police in Canada, I recognize and acknowledge that only certain people gain access to the police based on their perceptions of trustworthiness. I have and continue to work diligently to be cognizant of any 39 The WAYAG committee was led by the Abbotsford Police Department and included representatives from the Abbotsford School District, the Executive Director of the Abbotsford Restorative Justice and Advocacy Association, elected municipal representatives, and UFV faculty from the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. 136 potential bias I might bring to the research in an effort to understand the ways in which it influenced this research and the findings. Simultaneously though, I make no effort to conceal the respect I have for police and peace officers. I endeavor to improve the relationship between the academy and police organizations by offering a critical analysis with the goal of contributing to improving police policies and practice, rather than to criticize, disparage, or discount the work of police officers protecting our communities from gang violence. Policy Analysis? Or Not… Throughout this research, the language of policy is frequently deployed. Interpretive theory and decentred analysis were helpful in developing insight as to why I see the world through this lens. Having been a federal civil servant my entire adult life prior to joining academia, my everyday functioning as an employee was dictated by policy. This immersion in policy affected almost every aspect of my personal existence, including whether or not I would have to work on Christmas Day, my entitlements for maternity leave, and whether I could be ordered to work overtime on a day of rest. Beyond the personal, policy affected every aspect of my work that required I administer more than 90 different pieces of legislation,40 all while ensuring due diligence in keeping with the requirements of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As such, reading and reviewing the endless litany of policy that both affects employees of the federal government internally and broader society externally just became common practice. The result has been that I read media articles with critical attention to whether they are likely to affect the policy agenda. I consider policy options and evaluation measures whenever new government policies are adopted or announced. This lens does not make me a policy expert and this research is not explicitly a policy analysis. Admittedly though, the recommendations that stem from this research culminate in a policy argument suggesting a way forward resulting from an assemblage of police officers’ perceptions of the problem, suggesting that their responses are, by their very nature, policy responses, regardless of whether the police officers I interviewed were explicitly aware of this. 40 https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/actreg-loireg/legislation-eng.html#_s1 137 The Interviews The use of purposive sampling by gatekeepers and snowball sampling allowed for the recruitment of participants for qualitative interviews designed to explore the views, experiences, and opinions of study participants (Gill, Stewart, Treasure, & Chadwick, 2008). To examine and better understand the nature and origin of police responses to gang violence in the Lower Mainland, it was beneficial to conduct face-to-face interviews with police officers engaged with the issue. From the outset, it was hypothesized that the structural conditions and nature of decision-making within the three participating police organizations would be disparate. Expecting to encounter three different ways of engaging with gang violence, a primary goal of this research was to ascertain the perceptions of frontline police officers engaged in gang interdiction strategies about the effectiveness of their unique situation and approaches, thereby offering a starting point to inform future considerations of evidence-based policing policy and practice. Research Questions As noted in the introduction, the qualitative interviews sought to accomplish four key goals: 1) Ask police officers about their perceptions around the form and function of gangs in BC, their understandings of the organization and structure of gangs, their perceptions of the nature of gang activities (including dial-a-doping), and how they have or have not changed over time. 2) Ask police officers about their perceptions of the role of ethnicity and non-traditional risk factors for gang activity as they present themselves in the context of BC’s Lower Mainland. 3) Ask police officers about efforts in gang prevention, intervention, and suppression, and their perceptions of the efficacy of these efforts. 4) Ask police officers about the challenges to effectively responding to gangs in BC. These questions were answered through a particular qualitative methodology similar to a case study of each organization. The structure was designed to provide exploratory information about the activities of police from the perspective of the officers within these three departments. As such, this research study is not designed as a formal evaluation of anti-gang programming, which would require an entirely different methodology. Instead, this research was undertaken as a first step in gathering empirical knowledge of the policies and practices that have been and are 138 being implemented in the community by police organizations to respond to local issues of gang violence. The qualitative methods utilized in this study are openly and purposely subjective, which may raise questions about its generalizability. However, the contribution that this research can make to the evidence base is in compiling police activities that can form the basis of future targeted evaluations. The intent of asking police officers what has worked for them is not an effort to definitively make conclusions about programming success. Instead, the intent was to assemble data to be used as a proxy for considering future research questions or potential avenues for future research to explore. As a corollary, the ‘what works?’ question was followed by ‘what did not work?’. What I did not anticipate was the incongruent nature of participants’ responses. There existed little consensus among officers within or across jurisdictions as to what efforts have been effective and which have not. In effect, many of the participants interviewed for this study believed that nothing they are doing is working which, they reason, is why the situation of gang violence in Lower Mainland communities persists. Several participants suggested that attempts to ‘do more with less’ and ‘be everything to everybody’ have rendered the police ineffective across numerous domains. In attempting to reconcile these often divergent perspectives, I offer police perceptions and then retrospectively examine the public health and social determinants of health literature suggesting that the ‘problem’ in the Lower Mainland is not actually one of gang violence, but is the net result of unmitigated demand for illicit narcotics fuelling the predatory accumulation of wealth by gangs and gang members in BC’s Lower Mainland. On the Ratcliffe (2019) Hierarchy of Police Evidence Scale, this study would rank a ‘0’ as research that provides expert opinion, anecdotes, and case studies. Ratcliffe (2019) noted that this form of research should be used to illustrate research data. However, from a practical perspective, I would argue that, as social science researchers, it is an enormous challenge to develop and implement an objective and rigorous randomized controlled experiment answering questions regarding a phenomenon that researchers know and understand little about because the required background research does not exist. Medical researchers simply cannot design a research project to quantitatively assess the success and utility of a given cancer treatment if they do not know what the treatment is or how it is being administered. As demonstrated throughout 139 this dissertation, there is a serious dearth of research that provides a knowledge base from which research questions can be formulated in examining police activities designed to respond to gang violence in BC. The findings presented in this dissertation offer a contribution to the knowledge base through their ability to inform future research questions by assembling empirical data about the ways in which police are responding to gang violence. Importantly, the results of this study contribute to the knowledge base by offering information about the ways in which police responses are being developed and implemented, the challenges police organizations are experiencing in their attempts to address gang violence in their particular jurisdictions, and the (albeit inconsistent) perceived successes and failures of these strategies from the perspective of the officers themselves. That said, the narratives offered by the police officers interviewed were not challenged, nor did I attempt to dispute their perceptions or beliefs about gangs in BC. Instead, all interviewees were treated as experts on the matter whose role it was to develop policy in response to gang violence. Though I might not personally agree with some of the perceptions and beliefs expressed during these interviews, I recognize that it is from this lived experience and perspective that police responses are being developed and implemented. This study is an important contribution as a first step intended to produce otherwise unpublished empirical data from which significant additional research is necessary. Access and Recruitment Prior to submission of the ethics application, I explored the use of ‘gatekeepers’ inside police departments to determine the viability of the study. In qualitative research, gatekeepers are those individuals whose approval is crucial to gain acceptance and access (Hesse-Biber & Leavey, 2011). Through prior professional experience, I had contacts in senior management in all three police jurisdictions. Potential gatekeepers were first contacted by an email that provided an overview of the intended research project and asked if their organization would be interested in participating in my study. Taylor and Bogdan (1998) cautioned that when seeking gatekeeper assistance, researchers must be truthful in explaining the purpose of the research and must emphasize that the research will not cause serious harm to the organization. It would be inherently unethical to seek gatekeeper assistance with nefarious intent, but it is also recognized that this tacit agreement not to cause harm may be interpreted as bias. In the context of this research, I consider this to be an agreement that the research may result in a critique of an organization’s practices and policy, but that any critique will be mobilized in a constructive 140 manner. This is where an intent to improve rather than embarrass or dismantle is front-of-mind for the researcher. As such, if the researcher’s intent or bias entering the project is to openly criticize an organization, the gatekeeper method of access is inappropriate (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). Taylor and Bogdan (1998) further cautioned that misleading information can have a serious negative effect on the researcher’s ability to recruit participants (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). When contacting gatekeepers, it was clearly outlined that the goal of the research was to generate knowledge that would contribute to the policing and gang literatures that would also be useful to and actionable by police organizations. After the initial contact, a dialogue was established whereby the police manager in each organization sought enough information to bring the potential project to their broader management team for approval. In each case, the organization indicated that they were interested in participating and would assist in facilitating the project. The granting of access by gatekeepers in the three police organizations took less than three weeks. It appeared that the police organizations were eager to participate in this research study for three main reasons. The first reason was because issues pertaining to gang violence in the Lower Mainland remains sufficiently prevalent as to be extremely important to police organizations. The second reason was because surprisingly little research has been done on the gang situation in Vancouver, and the police organizations indicated this was a much-needed area of knowledge. Finally, given my prior relationship with these three organizations, there existed an agreement that this research was not being conducted from an abolitionist perspective, where the criminal justice system is seen as unnecessary or predatory. Instead, this research project comes from the perspective that policing is a necessary component of the criminal justice system in an ordered society and research intended to provide constructive feedback to police, informing an evidence-base, is necessary. Once approval from all three police organizations was received, an application to UBC’s Behavioral Research Ethics Board (BREB) was submitted for consideration, which included information about which police organizations would be participating in the research. Ethics approval from the BREB was received on October 5, 2016 (H16-02371 in Appendix A). Upon receipt of this approval, the recruitment process for police interview participants was initiated. First, officers who currently or recently worked in gang units or units whose primary mandate was to investigate and prosecute gang activities were identified by the gatekeepers and contacted via departmental email by the Officer-In-Charge or their designate. 141 The email indicated that they had been identified as a potential participant in the department-authorized research study. Attached to that email were two documents; a letter outlining the purpose of the research that highlighted the voluntary and anonymous nature of the interview, and the informed consent form (see Appendix B). Included was also the primary researcher’s contact information. Police officers who fit the criteria and accepted the invitation to participate were scheduled for an interview during their shift at the local detachment most convenient for them. There are several concerns in qualitative research with respect to the use of gatekeepers. For example, it is possible that gatekeepers may purposely contact only potential participants that they believe will reflect positively on the organization (Ritchie, Lewis, Elam, Tennant, & Rahim 2014). Bucerius (2013) argued that although gatekeepers were often seen to be the point of access, their presence may also hinder the process of gaining the trust of the group. Another concern with respect to gatekeepers is that, as a result of their position of authority, potential interview participants may feel either directly or indirectly pressured to participate (Webster, Lewis, & Brown, 2014). This latter consideration was possible as all of the gatekeepers or their designates were senior-ranking members of participating police organizations. It might be possible that some police officers felt pressured to participate as a result of being approached by senior-ranking officers in their respective police organizations and may have had concerns that I would disclose the content of individual interviews. To mitigate such issues, Dicicco-Bloom and Crabtree (2008) recommended that researchers stress the voluntary nature of participation and solicit participant consent on multiple occasions. In keeping with these suggestions, consent forms that stipulated the confidential nature of the project were used. Consent was sought at multiple points of the process by attaching the consent forms to the initial email sent by the gatekeeper and cc’d to the researcher in the one-on-one email sent by the researcher to individual participants with the consent form attached, in the email from the researcher to interested participants to set up the interview time, and at the beginning of every interview when the participant was asked to complete and sign the consent form. Of the 45 interviews conducted, only one individual seemed reluctant to participate. This interview was terminated after only 15 minutes and the data from that interview was destroyed. Initially, employing gatekeepers to identify participants is a purposive sampling method that deliberately selects participants based on particular characteristics (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 142 2011). In a purposive sampling method, only participants who are assumed to have the knowledge and experience to offer meaningful contributions to the study are selected, and this criterion is determined early in the research process. Because this research required access to a highly specialized group of individuals within a highly secretive, closed group of police officers, purposive sampling was the most viable initial method of recruitment. This is because purposively sampled participants are “most likely to have the experience and expertise to provide quality information and valuable insights on the research topic” (Denscombe, 2010, p.35). The snowball sampling technique was employed as a second measure of recruitment to counter the aforementioned concerns. In snowball sampling, the researcher asks one or more participants to refer or recruit other participants from their personal network (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011). Both sampling techniques yielded subjects who met certain criteria, particularly experience in gang interdiction strategies. The use of these two methods of sampling was intended to bolster the quality of the research method. While random sampling is often touted as optimal within the domain of qualitative research, this was not considered an option for this study because its use would be unlikely to result in participants who had direct experience with developing and implementing the organizations’ responses to gang violence. Ethical Concerns Every effort has been made to protect the confidentiality of participants in this research. All of the transcriptions and audio recordings were securely stored on an encrypted, password-protected device. At the time of transcription, participants’ names were replaced with coding identifiers and pseudonyms, and all identifying factors, such as colleagues’ names, were removed from the transcript to further protect participants’ identities. After transcription was complete, all of the audio recordings were securely digitally erased. Although this research is considered low risk, these protocols are in keeping with those generally employed with this kind of qualitative research and meet the requirements of the Government of Canada’s tri-council policy statement on ethical research with humans, as well as those of the UBC behavioral ethics research board. The greatest potential risk to participants would arise if it became known that they expressed negative views about their organization, organizational policy decisions, enforcement tactics, or their colleagues. These potential consequences may include jeopardy to 143 career development or advancement, as well as the potential to be alienated or ostracized by fellow officers and other potential forms of backlash within the organization. Data Collection: Semi-Structured Interviews This study employed a qualitative methods approach with in-depth, semi-structured interviews being the primary method of data collection. A qualitative approach was selected because it offered a foray into the lived experiences of police officers that could not be conveyed through quantitative methods. All of the interviews were conducted face-to-face in meeting rooms or boardrooms at police offices. Face-to-face interviews are the preferred method in qualitative interviewing as it allows researchers a better opportunity to develop rapport with study participants and to take into consideration non-verbal actions (Yeo et al., 2014). Body language and facial expressions are important cues to assist researchers in whether they should be probing further for details (Yeo et al., 2014). Before commencing each interview, participants were provided with a copy of the informed consent agreement and asked to read it. The police officers were again notified that participation was entirely voluntary and could be withdrawn at any time until the date specified in the consent form (February 1, 2017). Participants were then verbally asked if they wished to participate in the study, if they consented to the interview being audio-recorded, and asked to sign a consent form. After consent was clearly established, the interview began. At the end of each interview, participants were asked if they could think of other police officers who may have insight to offer. On several occasions, the names of potential participants provided through the snowball sampling technique had already been contacted and/or interviewed. For reasons of confidentiality, this information was not shared with the referring participant. Instead, the information about the potential participant was recorded and the participant was thanked for providing a referral. The frequent referral of individuals who were already participants in the research spoke to the level of saturation achieved within the small subset of police officers from these three organizations with experience in policing gang violence. In some cases, the suggested participants were not employed by one of the three organizations approved for participation in this research by the UBC BREB. Those individuals were not contacted for this study. On a few occasions, a new potential participant that had not already been identified was referred. This individual was contacted via their organizational email address and included the initial email sent 144 out by the gatekeeper indicating organizational approval of the research and the letter about the project and the consent form. When they agreed to participate, the interview was scheduled. Of the three individuals contacted using the snowball sampling method, two agreed to participate. The third was on long-term leave and did not anticipate returning to work prior to the completion of the study. Permission was sought to audio-record interviews in an effort to ensure that the author could accurately represent what participants said. Denscombe (2010) argued that taking notes by hand or relying on memory to determine what participants said may result in unintended misrepresentation. Palys and Atchison (2014) posited that trying to write down verbatim what an interviewee said may disrupt the flow of the interview as it forced the participant to stop talking and wait for the interviewer to finish writing. Further, Patton (2002) noted “ironically, verbatim notetaking can interfere with listening attentively” (p.381) on the part of the researcher, which could obviously affect the quality of the data collected. By not having to focus on every single word the participant said, the researcher was free to pick up on cues and develop pertinent probing and/or follow-up questions. Additionally, the recording of interviews “protects against bias and provides a permanent record of what was and was not said” (Gill et al., 2008, p.293). In this study, 43 of the 44 interviews were audio-recorded. One officer indicated their desire to participate in the study but stated that they did not wish to be recorded. In that instance, the interview was transcribed in real time during the interview. In a semi-structured interview format, the interviewer brings along questions to be addressed in the form of an interview guide (Arthur, Mitchell, Lewis, & McNaughton Nicholls, 2014). The questions and topics were inspired by the existing literature in the area of research or by the researcher’s objectives, and knowledge of the landscape of gang violence in the Lower Mainland. The interview guide was not developed as a structured schedule to be precisely followed but was used as a prompt for the interviewer to ensure all relevant topics would be addressed (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). The use of a semi-structured guide combined with open-ended questions is in keeping with interpretive methods and allowed for a general understanding of participants’ experiences with their organizations’ responses to gang violence. The use of semi-structured interviews also provided opportunities for follow-up questions to be asked if a participant discussed something that could be explored in more detail. Therefore, the interviews 145 were structured flexibly, enabling the author to alter questions in a way that accorded with officers’ experiences. For a copy of the schedule of questions, please see Appendix C. Participant Information Often in qualitative research where police officer interviews are the primary source of data, the researcher will ask about the officer’s current position, length of service, and rank. Though some of this information was collected, this information is not presented in the findings as it is likely to compromise the participant’s confidentiality. As these interviews were conducted with a small subset of police with current or recent experience in responding to gang violence, the potential population pool of participants was small within each organization. Simply put, protecting the confidentiality of participants was of greater importance than providing detailed information with respect to current position, years of service, or ethnic heritage. All of the officers interviewed for this dissertation were ‘experienced’ police officers. Similarly, rank is not identified and ascribed to each participant because each of the organizations has differing structures of rank, and the identity of participants could be revealed if this information were reported. To further protect the confidentiality of participants, three general categories were established to describe the officer’s role within the organization; ‘civilian’ indicating that they were employed by a police organization in a capacity other than as a sworn police officer, ‘member’ indicating they were an active duty police officer without supervisory responsibility, and ‘manager’ indicating they had other police officers reporting to them. As mentioned above, participants in each police organization were assigned pseudonyms alphabetically in the order they were interviewed. These pseudonyms are used throughout the discussion along with the assigned category of employment so as to contextualize the participants’ perspectives. As previously noted, one important caveat is that although officers from many different cultures and ethnic backgrounds were interviewed in the course of this research, none of the pseudonyms were created to reflect the ethnic identity or heritage of the police officers interviewed and information of this kind was not recorded. This has important consequences that limit the reader’s understanding and capacity for analysis because the reader cannot know whether the respondent is speaking of racialized groups as an insider or an outsider. The necessity to ensure confidentiality of participants left me in a quagmire given that in many cases, police officers of South Asian descent are talking about young South Asian men within their cultural communities participating in gang violence, but the reader is not provided with that context. My inability to 146 provide demographic context to the reader related to the ethnic or cultural background of participants sometimes renders a situation where the reader may perceive racial bias, which may be perceived differently if it were known that the participant is considered an “insider” in the diaspora the officer is referencing. Quite simply, there was no way to include the ethnic origins of participants without compromising their confidentiality given the distinct minority of non-Caucasian police officers in each of the three jurisdictions, which is congruent with national statistics indicating that only 8% of police officers in Canada self-identify as belonging to a visible minority group (Conor, Robson, & Marcellus, 2018). In an intentional effort to protect the identity of respondents, each participant was assigned a traditionally Anglo-Saxon name so as to ensure the confidentiality of all participants. Undoubtedly, there were occasions during which Caucasian police officers made comments regarding young South Asian men that suggest bias may exist, for example using the term “they”. However, ensuring the confidentiality of participants requires that those instances cannot be differentiated by the reader from situations where the police officer is South Asian referring to young gang-involved South Asian men within their shared diaspora using the term “they”. In this case, the officer is not referring to “them” as South Asian, but instead as belonging to the group by virtue of age or gang activity. This leaves me in an uncomfortable position for several reasons. The first is that this research was not designed to examine police perceptions of minority groups. In fact, there were no questions included in the semi-structured interview set that asked about race specifically. One question (14 – see appendix A) asked police officers if they perceived gangs in the Lower Mainland to be divided along ethnic lines. The answers offered were disparate and, in some cases, it became clear that police officers either did not know the answer or did not want to talk about it. Of the 44 interviews, 26 respondents replied “yes” to the question, and, in each case, went on to discuss the current violent conflict characterized by groups of South Asian men. Despite this research not having an intended focus on race or ethnicity, given that 26 of 44 respondents spoke specifically of South Asian gang violence, this has inevitably become an area of examination. In eight interviews, when asked whether gangs in the Lower Mainland were ethnically divided, respondents replied “No”. The remaining participants offered answers that were too vague to categorize, said “yes and no” with vague elaboration, or chose to skip the question. The discomfort here lies in the fact that, in keeping with UBC’s BREB requirements, I could not push the issue. This is not to suggest that 147 as an academic researcher, I would even have the capacity to influence a police officer to speak to me about race and ethnicity if they did not want to, but it felt uncomfortable, and, in some cases, it was clear they did not want to. In keeping with ethical considerations in qualitative research, I would move on to the next question. Despite my inability to critically examine bias in this research project, there exists a long history of documented racism by police towards minority groups in Canada. Since confederation, police have been involved in a wide array of state-building missions intended to assure sovereignty (Bell & Schreiner, 2018). Canada’s long history of colonialism suggests deep systemic bias exists rendering itself visible through interactions between the state and racialized groups as demonstrated in the west by the residential school system, the handling of the Komagata Maru, and the encampment of the Japanese during World War II. In each of these historic events, police held an important enforcement role as representatives of the state and played a constitutive role in asserting Canadian sovereignty “as a member of the globally dominant Anglo-Saxon community of states” (Bell & Schreiner, 2018, p.111). In recent years, much of the recent research examining racism and bias in Canadian policing has focused on the relationship between police and minority populations in Ontario. For example, Ben-Porat (2008) authored Policing multicultural states: lessons learned from the Canadian model, but the research collected, data examined, and interviews were conducted exclusively in Ontario. Similarly, Mullings, Morgan, and Quelling (2016) authored Canada the Great White North where Anti-Black Racism Thrives: Kicking Down the Doors and Exposing the Realities, but their data examined two examples related to the African Canadian community in Toronto. There are important demographic differences between Vancouver and Toronto that, despite both being major Canadian cities, may render the Toronto experience different than Vancouver. For example, both of the above noted articles focused on police interactions with the African diaspora as a significant population in that community. Creese (2019) posited that Vancouver’s population differed from other Canadian cities in that it was one of the most diverse cities in North America, with 49% of the population identifying as people of color, but noted that only 1% of the population are racialized as Black or claimed an African ethnic origin, rendering this group a hyper-visible minority in Vancouver. Her research offers important perspectives of negative or racialized interactions between 35 members of the second-generation African diaspora and police in Vancouver, and more research in this area is necessary. That said, 148 generalizing research on police bias in Ontario across the country may be problematic given the demographic differences. For example, research with Somali youth done by Thompson and Bucerius across several research projects in Surrey, Edmonton, and Toronto found that in both Surrey and Edmonton, some Somali youth participants mentioned police as a source of discrimination, which “stands in stark contrast to the Toronto data, where the young people we interviewed consistently cited the police as one of, if not the, main sources of discrimination” (Thompson, Bucerius, Osterberg & Mitchell, 2018, p.47). Without question, there is a significant body of research that suggests that police officers can sometimes hold problematic perspectives related to minority populations (Ben-Porat, 2009; Maynard, 2017; Mullings et al., 2016), and research examining the existence of racial bias among police is deserving of further research in the Lower Mainland context, but was beyond the scope and BREB certificate of this research project. During the interviews, the questions were intended to allow for a natural progression into an extended conversation in keeping with interpretive methods (Rhodes, 2018). In total, 20 interviews were conducted with Abbotsford Police Department members, 18 with the Surrey RCMP, and six with the Delta Police Department. The duration of the interviews varied as the shortest interview was 23 minutes and the longest lasted nearly two hours. The average length of interviews conducted for this study was 60 minutes. The original intent of the research was to interview 15 to 20 officers in each detachment. However, due to the smaller size of the Delta Police Department, combined with the nature of their community demography, there was not a sufficient pool of officers with experience in gang activities to draw the intended number of participants. That said, some of the Delta interviews offered the richest data with respect to the development and implementation of police responses, so the smaller sample size from this department is not considered to be a limitation of the study. In considering gender, of the 44 participants, ten were female. Though in qualitative research it is beneficial to achieve gender parity within a sample, in the policing environment, this is generally not possible. In 2018, only 22% of police officers across Canada were female (Conor et al., 2018). In this sample, 22% of participants were female, which is reflective of the national proportion of women in policing (see Table 10). 149 Table 10. Participant Information Data Preparation Each of the audio-recorded interviews was transcribed verbatim into a separate Microsoft Word document. These documents were anonymized and stripped of all identifying information. 150 For example, if a participant was describing a particular incident and named a fellow police officer, that individual’s name was replaced with ‘****’ in the transcription. Each of the Microsoft Word documents was re-read for accuracy and uploaded into NVivo 11.0, which is a qualitative research software program designed to assist in the collection, organization, and analysis of qualitative data and is widely used in social science research. Although initially transcribed verbatim, it was decided that distracting and repetitive words would be removed from the transcripts. These unnecessary words were removed to avoid any disruption or confusion they might cause when reading and understanding participants’ direct quotations. This included repetitively used non-words, such as ‘hmmm’, ‘so’, ‘ummm’, ‘uhhhh’, ‘aaaah’ and ‘like’. Moreover, when directly quoted, the grammar was modified, and punctuation included in an effort to best reflect the spoken meaning of respondents’ verbal responses. This approach was intended to promote the clarity and understanding that was specifically requested by members of the committee. Whenever a quote is included where there is unnecessary additional or repetitive information, it has been removed and is signaled by ‘…’. Moreover, throughout the Findings chapters, direct quotations from the officers interviewed for this project will be presented in a block quote with italics indicating the officers name and policing organization. This differs from the other quotations presented throughout the thesis that have been taken from published documentary material. These are presented in block quotes but do not include italics, and include the citation, year of publication, and page number presented as in-text citations. Data Analysis and Qualitative Rigor This study employed an inductive coding approach to help identify themes and concepts that emerged from the data (Palys & Atchison, 2013). By using an inductive approach, the themes were grounded in the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The process of data analysis involved reading each interview transcript to garner a broad understanding of the overall conversation with each participant. Next, the transcripts were reviewed a second time to identify common elements, themes, and patterns that emerged across interviews. The thematic coding that was then implemented has been described by Braun and Clarke (2006) as offering a flexible method for analyzing qualitative data that permits rich, detailed, and complex accounts of the data. As themes emerged, they were identified and entered as nodes in NVivo. The transcripts were read 151 and re-read coding the transcripts line by line into the identified thematic nodes. After this, key words were queried across the database and the results were examined for coding brevity. Once the initial coding was complete, more focused coding served to collate the themes into broader categories in a search for recurrent patterns or responses. The transcripts were read a subsequent time and analyzed for similarities and differences. Rather than following a linear path, often nodes would be redefined, restructured, combined, or abandoned. Whenever a fundamental change was made to a node, the complete set of transcripts were re-coded to conform with the restructured nodes. Once the nodes were finalized as a set of focused themes, the transcripts were reviewed one last time to ensure coding validity and reliability of themes and to identify any unique comments. Each of the three policing jurisdictions was coded into a separate NVivo file with duplicated nodes to ensure conformity of themes/nodes across participants’ organizations. Once all coding was complete, a combined file was created incorporating all three jurisdictions into one file stored on a password protected encrypted USB device. A table of the nodes, number of respondents coded to each node, and total number of coded passages to the node is presented in Table 11. Name of Node # of Respondents # Coded Passages About Gangs 44 757 Gangs now 44 556 Gangs then 36 194 Challenges 42 468 Federal crown 6 9 Jordan Decision 7 10 Provincial crown 7 14 Police Resources 31 150 Regional Policing 16 35 Dial-a-Dope 31 209 In the past 13 29 Present 28 148 Technology 13 31 Drug Trade 35 233 Drugs now 34 202 Fentanyl Crisis 21 63 152 Name of Node # of Respondents # Coded Passages Drugs then 13 28 Ethnicity Q 14 44 75 Police Responses 43 1988 Current strategies 41 693 Covert 25 60 Enforcement - Overt 34 194 Fail to stop 10 25 Non-enforcement 36 257 Community Outreach 24 173 Schools 33 185 Diff strategies 4 diff gangs 13 17 Parents 28 113 Past strategies 33 142 Covert 11 27 Enforcement - Overt 28 84 Non-enforcement 9 12 Perceived efficacy 35 102 Policy development 26 75 Ideas 25 60 Involvement 8 11 Specific Gangs 41 472 Bacons - Red Scorpions 38 180 Bindy Johal 9 11 Clay Roueche - UN Gang 28 71 Dhak - Dhure 13 31 Hells Angels (HA) 26 45 Independent Soldiers 6 9 Townline Hill 28 99 Specific Responses 36 167 Asset Forfeiture 10 29 Surveillance Camera 25 72 Warrants 13 15 Unsuccessful/ counterproductive 40 151 Table 11. NVIVO Coding Table of Nodes, Respondents Assigned, and Coded Passages. Author’s Own. 153 Though overall challenges in police responses to gang violence is a coded theme that receives significant attention in the Findings chapters, not all of the identified themes were directly addressed. Simply put, I was unable to address every one of the themes that emerged across 44 hours of interviews with 44 police respondents in a single thesis while incorporating a thorough literature review examining police responses to gang violence. Given the modest sample size across the three jurisdictions, and using an open-ended mode of qualitative inquiry, it is unsurprising that I was not able to provide quantitative demonstrations such as “90% of the sample indicated….”. The interviews were varied, but a sufficient level of saturation was reached. Attempts to make quantitative claims with qualitative data are inherently problematic. For example, the questions in the semi-structured interview guide did not include any specific questions about police officers attempting to pull a vehicle over with lights and sirens, and the vehicle speeding away without stopping. In policing, this is known as a “fail-to-stop”. In my interviews, ten respondents, without prompting, spoke of the risks to the community inherent in this practice, the frustration it is causing for police officers, and the incapacity of police to do anything about it. Ten of 44 is less than 25%, which doesn’t seem to be particularly salient, and if asked as a quantitative question “Are fail to stops a problem in your community” with a binary “yes” or “no” response, less than 25% of the sample indicating this is a problem would suggest that it’s not, in fact, a problem. In the qualitative realm, the fact that ten participants, without prompting, spoke of “fail to stops” when asked about the challenges in responding to gangs is inherently significant. This practice will be examined in the Findings chapters. Over the course of the interviews, and likely the result of the semi-structured and open nature of the interviews, several officers identified specific challenges that were not the focus of this research. For example, when asked about the challenges police face in effectively responding to gang violence, issues related to federal and provincial crown and the limitations related to the temporal requirements in the Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Jordan decision were expressed by seven respondents. Again, seven individuals, without prompting, offering information about a specific concern is significant. However, the consequences of the Jordan decision for the Canadian criminal justice system generally was not the focus of this research, and therefore this theme was not examined in-depth. At times, statements were made that offered important insight, but because only one participant spoke on that subject, the inclusion of their perspective in the Findings would likely 154 lead to their identity being revealed. As such, these were not included in the Findings. Conversely, 31 of 44 participants expressed concerns related to resourcing challenges, which are examined in-depth in the Findings chapters. Similarly, 31 of 44 participants expressed concerns about the illegal narcotics distribution strategy known as “dial-a-doping”, which is also examined in detail. Likewise, community outreach strategies directed at parents were mentioned by 28 of 44 participants, and prevention efforts in schools by 33 of 44 participants. As such, all of these themes were examined in detail in the Findings chapters. Document Analysis In the strategic case study methodology employed in this research project, document analysis yielded rich data, including excerpts and quotations, that were categorized into the major themes examined in this thesis. Document analysis involves superficial examination, known as skimming, thorough examination in fulsomely reading, and then interpretation (Bowen, 2009). The documents analyzed in this research included books, newspaper articles, anti-gang advertisements created by police, government documents and reports, and police produced strategy, research, and reporting documents. Bowen (2009) suggested that document analysis is a useful research method offering supplementary data, providing background and context, and capable of producing rich descriptions. Documentary analysis is most applicable to qualitative case studies where the subject of the research is a single phenomenon (Bowen, 2009). With respect to the depth and breadth of documents reviewed, Bowen (2009) argued that it is not the number of documents reviewed that is important, it is instead the “quality of the documents and the evidence they contain”, and argued that the incorporation of even a few can effectively complement the research (p.33). By its very nature, qualitative research is subjective with the author empowered to include (or not) specific ideas, considerations, and quotes from participants in selecting what to emphasize in the final product. In an effort to produce high-quality qualitative research, the methodology adopted for this study satisfies several fundamental requirements, namely credibility, transferability, fairness, authenticity, and trustworthiness (Bowen, 2009; Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Roulston, 2010). These attributes will be demonstrated throughout the Findings chapters. Trustworthiness is best exhibited through transparency, wherein the researcher reports 155 all research procedures, changes to research design, and the rationale for these changes, as outlined in this chapter (Hesse-Biber & Leavey, 2011). 156 Chapter 5. The Setting: Gangs in BC This, the first of three findings chapters, seeks to accomplish two goals. The first is to offer an overview of a long experienced, but less understood phenomenon of dial-a-doping. Though nearly 20 years old as a delivery method for illicit narcotics in BC, dial-a-doping has received little attention in the literature. The second half of this chapter, and where the findings begin, positions the police as policy actors, offering an overview of the perceptions of police interviewed in three Lower Mainland jurisdictions on the form, function, and nature of gangs in British Columbia, and considers police perceptions on the role of ethnicity, as well as perceptions of what have been termed ‘non-traditional risk factors’ for gang activity (Bhatt & Tweed, 2018; McConnell, 2015; Surrey, 2018; VPD, 2010). Dial-A-Doping in BC According to CFSEU-BC (2015b), dial-a-doping operates as a business, similar to a pizza delivery service. The dealer (who is the dial-a-doper, often called a dialer) is provided with a cellphone that has a phone number well known to customers and a quantity of drugs. The dialer answers the phone calls, takes the orders, and delivers the preferred product to customers, which is often a residence, with the entire transaction from phone call to delivery generally taking less than half an hour (CFSEU-BC, 2015b). Once the dialer runs low on product, the stock is replenished by another individual known as a ‘reloader’ who has picked up the additional product from a stash house (CFSEU-BC, 2015b). Though questions specifically about dial-a-doping weren’t on the interview schedule, 31 of the 44 respondents brought up concerns and challenges related to dial-a-doping. According to the police interviewed for this research, there is a frequent and significant disconnect between the dialer and senior gang members in BC. Dialers often do not know the identity of other dialers working in the same drug line, and sometimes do not even know who they are selling drugs for. There is seldom allegiance or protection offered by gang leaders to dial-a-dopers (CFSEU-BC, 2015b). Given this, dial-a-doping is a very high-risk activity with little long-term reward for the individuals in these hierarchies. As the front-line dealers, dialers are more likely to be caught by police, more likely to be subjected to violence by customers, and more likely to be held liable for this loss causing the dialer to owe a debt to the reloader (CFSEU-BC, 2015b). It is this disconnect between the perceived benefits of dial-a-doping, and the realities that has prompted 157 the CFSEU-BC to undertake a media campaign intended to communicate the realities of gang life, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter Six. The police interviewed for this research described the pervasive use of dial-a-doping as a business model for narcotics distribution a defining characteristic of controlled drugs and substances trafficking in BC. Dial-a-doping was perceived to be a lucrative, profitable, and extensively deployed mode of business across the interviews with police and relevant case law in BC: Figure 14. Diagram of a Typical Dial-a-dope Operation in BC. CFSEU (2015c) 158 A dial a dope trafficker works usually a 12-hour shift. They have a float, they have a line boss, they have a dispatcher, and they have usually someone who rides with them for security reasons. -Kevin, Surrey RCMP As demonstrated in Figure 14 gangs in the Lower Mainland have evolved to operate as business-like structures with diversified activities encompassing numerous criminally based streams of income (VPD, 2010). CDSA Drug trafficking charges in Canada are not Criminal Code offences; they are regulated under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA). There are important implications to this in the practical application of the law. Notably, in BC, charge approvals under the CDSA are the responsibility of Federal Crown Counsel, whereas Criminal Code offenses obtain charge approval from the Provincial Crown. In practical terms, the standards of evidence required for CDSA offenses are significantly more complex with the necessity for lab testing, a submission in each case completed by a drug recognition expert, and the expectation that full disclosure packages will be prepared and submitted prior to charge approval. Though dial-a-doping has been the primary method of distribution for nearly 20 years in BC, there remains scant academic attention focused on the model and it was perceived by police officers to have its origins in British Columbia: Dial-a doping popped up because it is really a B.C term. If you go to gang conferences in L.A., they do not even know what you are talking about when you talk about dial-a doping. -Oakley, APD When asked about the origins of dial-a-doping, Kevin in Surrey said: Between 2003 and 2005 you’re starting to see an evolution where people were being dispatched by pagers, and that was the introduction of the dial-a-dope drug trafficking. From this era is where you see a real expansion of people running what you know now as colloquial drug lines, we call it dialer lines, but its drug lines, they are a big thing. -Kevin, Surrey RCMP One purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the body of knowledge on dial-a-doping available in the literature. An extensive review of which produced little academic research focused on dial-a-doping. Hrymak (2018) suggested that, Street-level traffickers or ‘pushers’ are the people who sell directly to the purchaser for their personal use. A street level traffickers [sic] typically sells the product to the end user by walking or riding bikes in a particular area; being a participant in dial-a-dope trafficking schemes where people use a cell phone to take orders and deliver drugs or use a residence, such as a crack shack. Drug trafficking works in a hierarchical fashion and street-level drug traffickers usually work under a mid-level drug trafficker who loads the individual with the drugs for distribution. Street-level 159 dealers typically do not mix, cut, or package the drugs. The street-level trafficker does not carry a large volume of drugs at one time given the potential impact on the drug trafficking operation if the drugs were seized by law enforcement or through theft. These traffickers are considered the lowest rung in the drug hierarchy and are more likely to be detected by law enforcement. Individuals at a higher level of the trafficking operation, either as couriers, mid-level dealers, or high-level dealers, insulate themselves from detection and are more difficult for police to detect. (p.154). Squires and Plecas (2013), in describing the situation in Abbotsford during the height of the 2008-2009 gang conflict, concluded that: All those who had previously worked independently as growers or sellers (of marijuana) were ultimately forced to join a gang or cooperate with organized crime who had taken complete control of the market. This market control allowed them to engage in massive shipments of drugs and weapons between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. At lower levels, gangs assisted with movement of product and controlled drug trafficking through sales on the street and through Dial-a-Dope operations, allowing customers to arrange for drug delivery by telephone. The business structure of the illegal drug trade was a complex hierarchy controlled by organized crime at the top, to lower-level participants, often teens or young adults, who sold drugs to friends, on the street, at local schools, and through Dial-a-Dope arrangements. Guarding the drug supply line was essential to ensure ongoing revenues. Any threat to business could not be tolerated (p.7). In the absence of considerable depth and breadth of the scholarly literature, and in an effort to develop a robust literature on dial-a-doping, I decided to search relevant case law for information that could be used as secondary information alongside the assertions of police officers interviewed in this research. R. v. Franklin, 2001 BCSC 706, is considered important case law because the sentencing judge, the Honorable Mr. Henderson, provided a fulsome and thorough description of Dial-A-Dope operations and the relevance of this model (at paras 17-20). This extensive description offered in BC Courts in 2001 is indicative of the longstanding existence of dial-a-doping in British Columbia. Some explanation of Dial-A-Dope operations is relevant. Traditionally, drugs were disseminated at the street level by purchasers going to certain areas of town and taking the initiative to seek out those who sold the drugs on street corners and in back alleys. This, to some extent, constrained the dissemination of the product. A Dial-A-Dope operation is different. Anyone, anywhere in the Lower Mainland can place a telephone call to a vendor of narcotics and, after establishing his or her credibility by satisfying the vendor that he or she is not an undercover officer, make an arrangement to have the drugs delivered to wherever the purchaser happens to be. Typically, the drugs are delivered within 15 or 20 minutes and handed over in exchange for cash. This has several significant results. First, it makes these drugs, and I refer primarily to cocaine and heroin, more readily accessible throughout the Lower Mainland than they have been in the past. It makes them accessible with less effort on the part of the purchasers. Purchasers, and here I think of adolescents, who might feel intimidated at the thought of seeking out a drug dealer in the recesses of the Main and Hastings area may, nevertheless, in the relative comfort and safety of suburban locations, easily purchase cocaine and heroin as long as Dial-A-Dope operators are willing to oblige them. I infer also that Dial-A-Dope operations are profitable. There is no evidence before me as to how much a typical Dial-A-Dope dealer makes in the course of a day or a week but, having sat as the trial judge on a number of these cases, I am aware that it is a profitable way to make easy money. 160 The Honorable Mr. Justice Henderson in R. v. Franklin, 2001 BCSC 706, continued (at paras 47-49): It must be said that the Lower Mainland of British Columbia is overrun with cocaine and heroin. Those who are willing to disseminate drugs through the community by Dial-A-Dope operations are responsible for the ready availability of these drugs. People, such as Mr. Franklin, who engage in Dial-A-Dope operations, are lured into them by the high profits available with little effort. It is easy money. The destructive potential of these drugs is so well known as not to require comment. It is my view that this is the sort of offence where general deterrence has an impact. One does not enter into a Dial-A-Dope operation impulsively or spontaneously. It is necessary to obtain a supplier, to outfit oneself with a pager and a cell phone and a vehicle, and to make sure the word gets around. It is a calculated decision to engage in a particular type of business. It is reasonable to think that those who are considering that decision will take into account the likely penalty they would receive upon conviction. In other words, general deterrence is a genuine consideration in cases of this sort. More recently, in R. v. Dickey, 2016 BCCA 177, Honorable Mr. Justice Lowry described (at para. 28) the dial-a-dope enterprise and its effect in this way: Dial-a-dope drug selling, being essentially ordering delivery of illicit substances by phone, facilitates the ease of obtaining drugs in communities and the infiltration of a criminal trade. It is a crime that requires forethought and planning, a cell phone, a drug supplier, packaging materials, sometimes measuring equipment, and usually a vehicle. An important characteristic of dial-a-doping is that dealers are seldom users experiencing addiction, which, according to the police interviewed for this research, is counter to the circumstances found in the minimal hand-to-hand dealing that occurs in the most socio-economically challenged neighborhoods in the Lower Mainland including the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, and what is known as ‘The Surrey Strip’. In R. v. Cisneros, 2014 BCCA 154, the accused was 27 years old at the time of the offence with no prior criminal convictions. He held a grade 12 education, a two-year automotive technician course, some college courses in marketing, and was in his third year of a carpentry apprenticeship program at BCIT at the time of his arrest. Like many dial-a-dopers in BC, Mr. Cisneros was not a drug user. In the decision, it was noted that Mr. Cisneros indicated that he had supplemented his income, at times, over the previous 10 years by selling drugs and, as such, his involvement in drugs was purely for economic gain (paragraph 6).41 Another court decision, R. v. Oates, 2015 BCCA 259 is helpful in its description of a typical dial-a-dope transaction: Mr. Oates is 31 years old. On February 28, 2013, he was arrested in a dial-a- dope investigation. On that evening, a police officer telephoned a suspected dial-a-dope number and requested ‘forty hard’, meaning $40 of crack cocaine. The police officer and the person on the cellphone made arrangements for a meeting. The officer parked her vehicle at the agreed location and upon a vehicle entering the area, exited her vehicle, and approached the male occupant. She asked him for forty hard. He placed two small bags into her hand, and she gave him $40. The man then drove 41 R. v. Cisneros, 2014 BCCA 154 (CanLII) 161 away and other officers observing the transaction pursued. The man was arrested. A search of the vehicle disclosed a cell phone and car rental agreement. In the process of attempting to flee, the man was seen throwing a clear baggy from his car. When recovered, the baggy had five small bags of heroin with a street value of $330. The substance purchased was crack cocaine. The man was Mr. Oates. Recognition of dial-a-doping as a business has been well established by the courts. In one of the few scholarly articles that references dial-a-doping in BC, Buxton, Sebastian, Clearsky, Angus, Shah & Spacey (2011) suggested that one concern with the dial-a-dope delivery system was the inclusion of additional steps in the supply and delivery chain. This increased the risk of contaminants being added, either for profit or to retain some drug for personal use. That said, they argued that it was unlikely that the contaminant was added to cause intentional harm as it was in the best interest of the dealer to maintain their client base. Given that this article was written in 2011, this may or may not be the case in the present environment where lacing narcotics with fentanyl has become a prevalent and persistent policy concern. Patrick in Surrey noted that it didn’t matter what drugs were being dealt, the practice of dial-a-doping has been a relatively stable business model with little variation across time or across gangs, and said: A lot of people equate gang violence to the drug trade. I have never really bought that because in Surrey, we have a thriving drug market. You can run a successful dial-a dope organization without conflict if you so choose. You have to get a client base, and, if you have like 50 clients, you are successful with money coming in every day. -Patrick, Surrey RCMP The notion that dial-a-doping was a structured business was also noted by Matt in Abbotsford who described the dial-a-doping network as ‘franchise’ operations. The UN, the Bacon Brothers…. what they were was a loose group of individuals. With someone who champions, somewhat quasi-leadership, the CEO if you will. Everything else fell into a franchise operation. You had an owner of a franchise, who declared his or her loyalty to that group, but was not a core member of that group. -Matt, APD. Officers were asked about challenges to police in suppressing gang violence. The responses varied across the region, with 10 of the 44 respondents noting the propensity of dialers in their jurisdiction to fail to stop when approached by a police vehicle. This was not a specific question in the interview schedule, so the saturation level is important because unprovoked, ten of the interviewed officers spoke of their concerns related to fail-to-stops: I read the watch office reports every day…and I’m sure I see at least one or two fail to stops every shift. Failing to stop is fleeing from police. What do we do about it? Nothing, right. They put their lives at risk, they put the public safety lives at risk, and we just sit there and watch them break all traffic laws, and drive away in a very dangerous manner. 162 -Felix, Surrey RCMP Though officers in all three jurisdictions reported fail-to-stops as problematic, in Surrey, they were reported as being a near daily occurrence. They just take off on the police now. We have those fail to stops daily, they’ve learned that ‘Oh, I just take off on police; they can’t do anything’. -Alexander, Surrey RCMP The public does not realize how many people just fail to stop for the police every day. -Jenna, Surrey RCMP In Abbotsford, officers described the instance of ‘fail to stops’ as being problematic, but the impression offered was that they were less prevalent than in Surrey because none of the respondents in Abbotsford indicated it was a daily occurrence. While this could not be empirically verified, the impotence felt by the officers in both jurisdictions in their inability to do anything about this dangerous behavior was aptly described by both Hayden and Kelly: The fail to stop thing, I just can't even put into words how frustrating that is, so ‘I will just drive like an idiot and I will just drive off’ …Our hands are tied by the Emergency Vehicle Operation policy, the EVO we call it. We can’t pursue. We do not know who they are. They could be property crime guys, they could be gang guys, I do not know. So, they just do not stop. So, we have got a plate, and we can charge the registered owner with driving offenses, but that is about it… We will catch up with the R.O. later? No, because the R.O. does not go home. You may never see that vehicle again or its contents or who was in it. Because we have no teeth; they have taken that away from us…We had three [fail to stops] last block [of shifts]. -Kelly, APD We know what to look for, the type of vehicles, we know for the most part, ‘yeah, this car will not stop for us if we try to pull this thing over’. -Hayden, Surrey RCMP The officers in Surrey and Abbotsford that expressed concern and frustration with the fail-to-stop experience, and those who knew of the program spoke with envy of Delta’s Starchase system. Delta PD was the first police department in Canada to use the Starchase pursuit management technology implemented in January 2017. The Starchase technology is mounted to the front grill of the police vehicle and when a vehicle fails to stop, the driver essentially launches a GPS device onto the offending vehicle (Jacques, 2017). Once attached to the suspect vehicle, the GPS device allows police to fall back and monitor the location of the vehicle and deploy resources to safely apprehend the driver once the vehicle comes to a stop. Delta Police Public Affairs Officer Sharlene Brooks was quoted in the media saying, ‘It is very frustrating to have limited capacity 163 to capture those that flee from police and we needed to seek out available tools to combat this issue’ (Jacques, 2017, para 5). In the course of conversation, if officers in either Surrey and Abbotsford expressed frustration with fail-to-stops, they were asked whether their department had the Starchase technology. Officers in Abbotsford indicated they believed installation of the units would be happening soon. In Surrey, officers indicated that it would be unlikely the technology could be deployed there: For us to utilize the Starchase, we have to rewrite policy because we would have to have that pursuit to catch up in order to deploy the Starchase, so we have looked at it. We are still looking at it. But we have national policy and they have local policy. -Jenna, Surrey RCMP Challenges related to structural barriers are apparent throughout policing. At times, the police officers interviewed in this research indicated that these barriers were different depending on whether one was employed by a municipal department or the RCMP given that policy changes, equipment purchases, and the implementation of new technology in the RCMP environment requires approval from Ottawa, was perceived to be time-consuming and described as frustrating: I think we should tap more into communicating with the public. And I think that’s a result of Ottawa being too involved in our business, we’re well behind any other municipal police force and how they engage the public. -Frederic, Surrey RCMP An in-depth examination of the different structural barriers that exist when a national police force is contracted for municipal policing is beyond the scope of this dissertation. However, it is an important distinction that the Surrey RCMP and municipal police operate with differing barriers to policy development and implementation, unequal access to equipment, and differential access to new technologies delayed by the RCMP requirements that such decisions come from Ottawa. These issues have recently come to the forefront of media and policy attention related to the transition of the Surrey RCMP to a municipal department. Though there exists little scholarly research on dial-a-doping specifically, it appears that case law indicates that this phenomenon is not unique to BC. This is not surprising given the proliferation of similarly structured businesses, such as Uber and Skip the Dishes, that effectively use the same business model to deliver different commodities. As early as 2005, police in Calgary were investigating dial-a-dope lines, as noted in the Supreme Court of Canada 164 decision in R. v. Cornell (2009) who was associated to the Fresh off the Boat Killers Gang, an organization that has long had ties to the UN gang in BC (Bolan, 2016c). In Ontario, there are an increasing number of dial-a-dope cases undergoing appeal due to questions of entrapment related to the methods used by police in conducting investigations (Sa, 2015). In the United Kingdom, dial-a-doping has been called ‘dial up’. Harding (2012) described drug dealing in South London: Increasingly, the open drugs market is becoming a closed market facilitated by the use of mobile phones. A dial up service is offered to regular customers. Class A drugs, such as crack, heroin, and cocaine, are also dealt in SW9 and this offers members the opportunity for more profitable returns. The main suppliers live off-borough. The street gang Elders employ an overseer for their whole operation. He operates as the main person moving the Class A drugs about the neighbourhood, distributing them to Olders. Dividing up the drugs is a spatial practicality rather than a business function. This ensures each member has received something to sell. The Youngers will meet up with customers then telephone an order; Youngers retain several phones. The Shatter is usually on a mountain bike. The Older with the Class A drugs then meets the runner, passes the drugs over, and the runner will go and meet the client. Only small amounts are passed at this level to minimise arrest. Youngers are favoured for their wily ability to outrun police. It is also assumed they will get lighter sentences if caught (p. 91). It would appear that dial-a-doping is not a business model exclusive to the Lower Mainland, as it has been suggested by some of the police interviewed for this research. It is unclear why this misconception perpetuates. That said, in the Lower Mainland, officers interviewed for this research perceive that dial-a-doping existed with such veracity and proliferation that, with the exception of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and what is known as ‘the strip’ in Surrey, hand-to-hand open-air drug dealing transactions were virtually non-existent. This has important implications for the ways in which turf is understood in the local context given that territory is associated to specific dial-a-doping drug lines, rather than geographic territories as would be understood in the open-air drug dealing market. When officers expressed frustration with dial-a-doping, the connection between drug lines and gang violence was noted: Members of these crime groups are responsible for the homicides, the shootings, the kidnappings, all the violence within the lower mainland…the increase in violence in the public venues which they are using to showcase, in order to scare the other lines. That is the biggest problem we have now, and it’s putting the public at risk. -Amanda, DPD 165 It is possible that dial-a-doping as a delivery method for illicit narcotics was first deployed in BC and then transferred through social networks to other places. As a notion, this is supported given that the first court records mentioning dial-a-doping in BC were in 2001, but not in Alberta until 2005. The evolution of dial-a-doping was not a focus of this research, but became a significant part of the findings given the saturation of this issue across participants (31 of 44). In recent years, it was not necessarily the presence, but the nature of gang violence that garnered attention as a policy issue requiring a dedicated police response. That said, it was not just the structure and organization of gangs that had been rapidly changing, but also their composition. Police as Policy Actors – Perspective Matters Gang scholars in Canada have frequently argued that gangs in this country are qualitatively different than those in the US, positing that these differences limit the transferability of American research on gangs (Dunbar, 2017; Ezeonu, 2014). Simultaneously, gang scholars in BC have argued that gangs in BC are qualitatively different in nature from the gangs presented in the literature from the US and throughout the rest of Canada (CFSEU-BC 2015b; Juhasz, 2019 McConnell, 2015; McCuish et al., 2015; Surrey Mayors Task Force, 2018). Gravel et al. (2018) indicated that there is a need for research studies to understand the level of organization of gangs, their activities, and to identify possible intervention points, and suggested that community-based research on BC gangs is necessary. Though this dissertation does not offer an examination of gang activity and organization from within gangs in the Lower Mainland, it will provide an overview of the qualitative description of the form, function, and organization of gangs in the Lower Mainland from the perspective of police tasked with responding to them. This description is not comparative in nature and thus the argument is not about difference, per se. The problems experienced in each community are unique and, as such, to compare the responses would be akin to comparing apples to oranges. Given the focus of this research on policy creation, implementation, and evaluation, the format selected was to consider each policy option and examine the efforts made in each community. Therefore, this research is an effort to contribute to the understanding of gangs in BC with respect to their form and function, perceptions and understandings of their organization and structure, perceptions of the implications of ethnicity and race, the nature of their activities, including an overview of dial-a- 166 doping as an important characteristic of gangs in BC, and the ways in which what have been termed non-traditional risk factors present themselves in the BC context. This perspective builds on the prior work of McConnell (2015) who offered important insight and what was really the first look at the interplay between gangs and organized crime in BC. Police Perceptions of the Organization, Structure, and Hierarchy of Gangs in BC Across each organization and in every interview, police officers were asked to describe the gangs they have been in contact within their respective jurisdictions, as well as their perceptions of gangs throughout the Lower Mainland more broadly. Interestingly, Ian in Surrey communicated a definition of gangs that was far more in keeping with the organized crime literature than with street gangs. For example: [We] need to ensure that people have an understanding of what a gang is. We don’t have a traditional gang, like the Hells Angels.42 In my mind, they’re a gang. If the Red Scorpions were here…. back in their day, they’re a gang. The UN, they’re a gang, they have insignia, they have meetings, then they profit from their crimes. -Ian, Surrey RCMP Ian’s description of a gang is far more consistent with descriptions of organized crime in the academic literature. The officers interviewed consistently asserted that the profitability of drug lines is the primary reason that gangs maintained a stronghold in BC. Often described as various business models, there was, across all interviews, a clear recognition that, but for the ability to make considerable money in the movement of illicit narcotics, gangs would not have achieved their prominence. This notion that gangs in BC have been mischaracterized and are actually more reflective of organized crime was a primary finding of McConnell’s (2015) research. He concluded that BC gang members are motivated by financial profit and status and come together for the purposes of doing business and protecting their drug lines. Moreover, he suggested that membership in BC gangs is fluid and that self-sacrificing loyalty to one gang is incredibly rare. McConnell’s (2015) assertions are largely consistent with the information offered by officers suggesting that the most notorious gangs of the past 15 years, including the Red Scorpions (Bacon Brothers), the United Nations Gang (Clayton Roueche), the Independent 42 At the time of these interviews in the late months of 2017, there was not a Hells Angels Clubhouse in Surrey. The Hardside Chapter is believed to have established in Surrey some time in 2018. 167 Soldiers, and the Dhak/Duhre Crime group, have been characterized by levels of sophistication that would position them at Levels 3 and 4 of Wortley’s (2010) gang continuum: The way I used to present it is that it [gangs in BC] is organized crime with hierarchy, rules, written rules, letterheads if you will. They were more business-like in structure…create the parent company, and anybody that wants to purchase our product and then sell that product is a franchise operator. Then, we will either own the license or sell the product. Not everybody was able to buy the license. They could buy the product, but not the license. Independent soldiers are a part of that group too. Again, that is where I put them; mid-level, fluid, structured, criminal activity… opportunistic and prone to violence. -Matt APD Somewhat strangely, Jody in Abbotsford seemed to have a nostalgic tone, where officers acknowledged the violence-tempering role that was the result of the overt control the Hells Angels exerted in the past, indicating that such control was perceived to dampen the brazen violence that characterizes the current gang conflict:43 There seemed to be more of a hierarchy…if you were going to do something stupid, like, do a drive by shooting…a decade ago, you were looking for some degree of approval. And, it certainly would have been frowned upon in those organizations to be pushing drugs and using drugs at the same time. I think, and this is anecdotal, but I think there has been a shift...I think the reason that you are seeing so many shootings take place in the Lower Mainland is because no one is looking for approval. -Jody, APD Mark in Surrey indicated that the success of the Hells Angels depended on their ability to regulate violence and their focus on business profit: The Hells Angels… they know the game, they don’t want heat; they do the crime behind closed doors, but when we’re there, they’re good, you know what I mean?…When the Hells Angels wanna assassinate somebody, you don’t hear about it, the guy is just gone. You find a body a couple months later...But you deal with these (new) guys, they just don’t care. – Mark, Surrey RCMP Though officers noted that the Hells Angels seem to have less overt control over violence in the current gang conflict, the existing relationships and longstanding alliances between the Hells Angels and various gangs remains an important feature of the gang landscape in BC: Clay Roueche, the Bacon Brothers, the IS, they forged (alliances) with the outlaw motorcycle groups, the Hells Angels. They forged a tie with them, and they developed a business model…a conglomerate as opposed to just a single business entity. -Matt, APD 43 Interestingly, research done in Toronto by Urbanik, Thompson, and Bucerius included qualitative interviews in which young residents of neighborhoods undergoing gentrification perceived increased violence the result of destabilization of power and the creation of power vacuum. Though very different circumstances, the descriptions are similar. 168 All respondents were asked about the challenges to policing gangs, 31 of 44 respondents spoke to issues related to police resources. Thomas in Surrey suggested that investigations of these more sophisticated gangs have fallen by the wayside in recent years iterating that this was, in part, a result of the inability at the RCMP detachment level to dedicate the expertise, time, and resources necessary to appropriately investigate the Hells Angels. These officers expressed a concern that the concordant result is the near legitimization of their activities given that they publicly flaunt membership. Moreover, this results in police officers engaged in frontline responses to gangs focused on the ‘little fish’ or ‘low hanging fruit’: We tend to end up dealing a lot with the low end…especially in the gang unit right now… the up and coming dial-a-dopers involved in drug trafficking. As far as higher level… the Hells Angels, we have not had an investigation going back, I’m probably thinking mid-2000s the last one I can think of off the top of my head. Other organized crime groups like the bigger ones, the UN gang, Bacon brothers…in the mid-2000s…we had a lot of investigations going on with them, not so much now. -Thomas, Surrey RCMP By and large (36 of the 44 participants) suggested that gangs in BC have changed over time. Shane in Abbotsford noted that gangs have moved from more stable and organized structures to a fluid and constantly evolving environment filled with unpredictability: Now, it is less predictable. Like we are certainly more alert for when there is an incident or waiting for that retaliation. We are always head’s up to that, but again the incident may not have anything specifically to do with the gang, or with the drug trade. It may just be that these two combatants went to high school with each other, or one of them is dating someone’s cousin, and when we have peeled back the layers, we have been surprised the number of times that we thought that this was about the ongoing conflict in town and it absolutely had very little to do with it. It’s more and more difficult to say ‘gang X is going after gang Y’ because of all the inherent reasons that people in competition in conflicting business would want to eliminate the competition. Sometimes, it is nothing more than a glance at an intersection from two cars that are just sitting there and… Old school they might have flipped each other off, they might have just ignored each other… or they might, you know, if it escalated, they might look somewhere in the food chain for permission to do something more. But now, people are just pulling out their guns. -Shane, APD The assertion that structure and organization was attributed to the dominant gangs of the past was a concern expressed by both Dave in Surrey and Cherish in Abbotsford: They appeared more structured. Back in 2005, I was in drug section in Chilliwack and dealt with the UN (United Nations) gang and dealt with some of the IS (Independent Soldiers) and different individuals like Clay Roueche… we tried to stop these individuals. It appeared structured. Even though it was a gang war at times, where it was tit for tat and trying to take control of a specific area, it was still (structured). -Dave, Surrey RCMP 169 If I look back to when I was in serious crime in 05/ 06, we primarily dealt with the Duhres, and the Bacon group was coming up, and Dhaks…They seemed to be a little bit more organized…there was extreme violence and targeted violence, that still goes on today. But there seemed to be a little more, from my perspective, a little more structure to their organizations. -Cherish, Surrey RCMP Delving further into the evolution of gangs in these three communities over time, Garret in Abbotsford said the gangs of the past were qualitatively different from those that are developing today in terms of ethnicity, age, and stability: You would get your predominately white UN gangs, Independent Soldiers…I have seen a definite change...I didn't notice specifically prevalent before were the South Asian gangs... in Abbotsford specifically, you are seeing at least a more prevalent tenure of South Asian gangs and…a steady amount of violence that comes associated with that… I am seeing younger individuals involved in gang activity and gang lifestyle… your Red Scorpions, your Independent Soldier gangs, were generally younger males, maybe early 20s, maybe a little later than that, you might get the odd teenager like late 19 and 18. Now, because I am…in the intelligence section, there are a lot of younger males especially in the South Asian community: 14, 15, 16. It is not uncommon to see …much younger ages than you would have historically. -Garrett, APD When asked about the challenges associated with policing gangs, several officers asserted that the situation today was more difficult to police than it had been in the past. For example, 7 of the 44 participants noted that the Supreme Court of Canada decisions in R v. Jordan has placed an enormous burden on police. Both Emerson in Surrey and Shane in Abbotsford noted that efforts of police to be evidence-based and intelligence-led was described as problematic, with enormous challenges in keeping abreast of the fluid nature of organizations today: It’s far easier to police gang violence when there’s structure, because it’s not as sporadic. -Emerson, Surrey RCMP The brazenness, the number of arms on the street, the inability for any reasonable person to try and dissect it and go ‘Well, this is the core problem’ like, if you were going to try and bring the two sides in for counselling, I do not know if you could identify what the core problem was. You would know what the core industry is for both sides, but I do not know that you would be able to pull out the core issue for both sides. And, sometimes it is not two sides, but three sides, or four sides, or eight sides, right? All complicating it. -Shane, APD These assertions by police in the Lower Mainland jurisdictions of Abbotsford, Surrey, and Delta are consistent with the findings of the CFSEU-BC who said this group of young dial-a-dope gang members is also a leading cause of the gang violence occurring in the Lower Mainland. Contributing factors also include the increased prevalence of firearms and individuals constantly switching gang allegiances (CFSEU, 2015b): 170 If you look at our ORG (organizational) charts, they’re not like they used to be. These are not rigid groups. One day they are friends, the next day he is screwing over the guys that he’s been best friends with, and he’s trying to start his own (dial-a-dope) line. And then friends are shooting at friends because the other guy just peeled off. And, suddenly he doesn’t want to be shot anymore, so he’s friends with the enemy that he used...it’s very fluid, it’s not...loyal. You know, it’s not loyal. In a ‘crip’ kind of gang, it’s not that at all, it’s where can I make the most money? They’re loyal to making their money, that is it. -Mark, Surrey RCMP Moreover, the Surrey Mayor’s Task Force (2018) concluded that ‘the extreme, sporadic violence is in large part connected to retaliatory gunfire between young people running dial-a-dope operations’ (p.8). Concerns about the difficulties presented in conducting police investigations in the absence of an understanding of the hierarchy within the gangs were frequently referenced. Kevin in Surrey noted that in the current context, it is difficult to obtain the resources and commitment necessary for substantial major case investigations in the absence of a sustained focus on one individual: This conflict is kind of weird because there is no real Jonathan Bacon to focus on, right? Because it is kind of a flattened organization. You have a bunch of these young little punk kids all born around 97/98, they are pretty young... you do not have that kingpin to focus on. Kevin, Surrey RCMP Officers described challenges differently depending on their assignment and role. Emerson from Surrey suggested that police efforts in recent years have felt quite futile with few major successes: We’ll pick a guy and try to hammer him for as long as we can. Okay, couldn't get anywhere, next guy, next guy until we could find, for a lack of a better expression, the low hanging fruit, you can actually enforce on…We don’t have those high flyers that you could just hammer at, and legitimately disrupt everybody underneath...You disrupt one, but there’s 14 others, where before you had 3 main groups. -Emerson, Surrey RCMP Gene in Delta suggested that the lack of any kind of hierarchical organization or structure in the present gang conflict is the result of a void: What ended up happening is that now there is a giant void in Surrey and Delta and basically any idiot kid with their Mom’s car, a cell phone, and an older cousin that can get him some rock, can create their own (dial-a-dope) line. -Gene, DPD When asked why the landscape of gangs in BC has changed, Cherish and Mark, both with the Surrey RCMP suggested that the changes were the result of a kind of natural evolution as high- 171 ranking members of several, if not most, of the traditional gangs in BC were either dead, incarcerated, or deported: I don't think it’s as organized or structured maybe because we don’t have the RS and UN; they’ve been disrupted. And…the Dhak/Duhre groups, everyone has been killed. -Cherish, Surrey RCMP You create a real quick vacuum there. You go from the high up echelon, finally we catch up with, or they catch up with it, and they end up all dead or in jail. You’ve left this big void that wasn’t gradually filled, so people need to gain the experience in the position to get into those spots and fill those voids. -Mark, Surrey RCMP The void or vacuum described by police was perceived to have resulted in the development of an unstable hierarchy, thereby creating a situation that is far more chaotic than it was in the past: It’s completely reckless, completely reckless. And they don’t care about the heat (that chaos brings) you know? -Mark, Surrey RCMP Oakley in Abbotsford suggested that at least a portion of the conflict was the result of members of the more traditional gangs having served their sentences and seeking to exert their authority and re-establish their control over drug lines after being released from prison: The Red Scorpion side of things appears to be a few higher end people with access to large amounts of drugs, distributing them to poor, addicted people that will dial-a-dope for them or through crack shacks…and, they are people who have been in and out of jail a lot. How are they recruited? It seems like a lot of them are addicted, so people are going into drug dealing because they are addicted to drugs, and they either owe a debt, or a debt is being imposed upon them… On the Red Scorpion side... certain people get out of jail, they will arrive back on the scene, and start to take over everything, and then they sort of run it all. And, it is usually done very violently. We do not hear about it in police reports because people do not call the police and tell them ‘oh my drug line got taken over’. -Oakley, APD The instability created by the vacuum is described as having an effect on police operationally with respondents asserting that investigating gang activity absent of an understanding of the upper echelon of gang organizations is problematic, with Tara in Abbotsford expressing frustration with their perceived inability to use intelligence-led44 or proactive policing models 44 Policing has long been criticized for its reactive nature. Intelligence-led policing is attempting to understand and prevent crime through “the use of intelligence-led approaches that allow for the development of customized, effective, and efficient strategies” whereas proactive policing is “where the policing strategy is forward-thinking through the use of intelligence-led strategies that rely heavily upon the use of crime analysts” (Cohen, Plecas, McCormick & Peters, 2014, p.25). 172 because the nature of gangs was changing so frequently: Police are historically slow to respond to things, and let alone the information we get, it comes in dated, so then you’re responding to something that's dated. When that happens, you’ve got these people that are changing alliances so easily, and so quickly, that sometimes whatever your coordinated response is, it is not going to be effective because that doesn’t even exist (anymore). That was two months ago that those people were working together, and now they're working with this (group). -Tara, APD In Abbotsford, Evan noted that this type of chaotic violence was ‘bad for business’ suggesting that by drawing police attention through nondescript violence, the current gangs are negatively affecting their dial-a-dope profits: The Hells Angels had more of a pecking order, when junior players were told to get in line, they would. Whereas [now] it's almost the opposite, you get junior members saying ‘I don't like this person because I fancy his girlfriend, and I want her for myself’ so they will go up the chain and the person that's more authoritative in that gang will give them their backing to go out and harass or threaten this person… they are more than willing to you know go and shoot him in the back because of that, for zero reason. I don't think the Bacons or the Scorpions would have put themselves in that sort of risk because it’s bad for business. - Evan, APD The bad for business narrative was repeated by Cohen in Abbotsford with additional concerns about the nature of violence in the current conflict: That's how the war starts. This guy drives by his house, shoots at his house…. I’m actually convinced that they don't want to hit anybody because they go out of their way to spray. To spray people and not really the targeted people...But, you know it's pretty cowardly...it's just random, night, drive-by shootings. -Cohen, APD Emerson in Surrey suggested that from his perspective, unplanned violence characterized the current gang conflict: It’s no easier to predict them shooting each other than it is for me to predict the weather in a week. But I can assume something is happening because of tension building. A lot of these guys are just driving down the road, and so and so is out, oh yeah ‘so and so is down there, let’s just shoot him right now’. I don't think a lot of them are preplanned. -Emerson, Surrey RCMP In sum, at the aggregate level, police described the gang hierarchy from 2005-2009 as relatively structured with clear leaders seeking an ever-increasing control of the lucrative illicit drug trade. As a result, warring with one another for turf and control of lucrative drug lines, some of which were established in the early 2000s, was common. At some point, starting in about 2009, police described the serious destabilization of gang organization and structures in the Lower Mainland. In the years that followed, the rival gangs that had gained prominence in the illicit narcotics 173 trade, notably the United Nations, the Red Scorpions, the Dhak/Duhre group, and, to a lesser extent, the Independent Soldiers began to devolve. The long-term incarceration of several prominent leaders, such as Clayton Roueche, Jamie Bacon, and Jarrod Bacon, along with the violent murders of numerous gang members in leadership roles, such as Jonathan Bacon, Gurmit Dhak, Sandip Duhre, and Sukh Dhak, resulted in a perceived destabilization of power. The caveat offered here is that this is only a snapshot of the enforcement resulting in sentences of incarceration combined with just a glimpse of the violence leading to the death experienced by so many gang-involved men in the past 30 years. Some of the more prevalent events that may have contributed to this destabilization are summarized in Figure 15 below. Figure 15. Events that May Have Contributed/Resulted in Destabilized Power 2009-2013, Author’s Own. Analysis of the qualitative data offered in this section suggests that the police tasked with responding to gang violence in British Columbia were, for the most part, challenged by the slow nature of police responses that rendered intelligence-led policing nearly impossible. By the time information was turned into actionable data, it was already dated because the gangs and gang members were fluid and rapidly changing. Moreover, the limited capacity of the police to effectively resource high-level investigations resulted in the police focusing on the lowest level 174 people in these gangs, typically dial-a-dopers, which are considered entry level work in the gang landscape in BC. As an outsider, gang-related violence was often difficult to discern in the media because the police were hesitant to come out and say that a deceased individual was involved in gangs in the absence of criminal convictions. Brianna, a civilian with Abbotsford readily acknowledged concerns with media portrayals and subsequent assumptions: They’ll (police) say the victim is ‘known to police’, and everyone goes ‘gangster’! -Brianna, APD This reluctance of police to overtly publicly identify gang-involved victims of homicide is understandable given the trauma this would bring to the family of the deceased. In his research, McConnell (2015) considered the language used by police media spokespersons and communicated through media outlets in BC, such as ‘the victim was known to the police’ or ‘this was a targeted shooting’, arguing that both of these monikers are used when the victims are gang-involved. In the Jhutty and Bhangal double homicide, two burnt out vehicles were found several kilometres away. Though in that case, neither the media or police initially stated explicitly that the deaths were gang related, car fires have become an indicator of gang violence in the Lower Mainland and believed to be an attempt to destroy evidence after a shooting (Chan & Grindlay, 2018). Police Perceptions of the Role of Ethnicity Officers in every jurisdiction were asked whether they believed gangs in BC’s Lower Mainland were divided along ethnic lines. By slim majority, participants responded yes (26 of the 44), all of whom elaborated that South Asian gangs currently present a significant challenge for police. Other respondents were less sure, with 3 of the 44 respondents saying “Yes and No” and offering elaborations of their justification; and 8 of the 44 responding “No”, that gangs are not ethnically divided. The remaining 7 respondents selected either to skip the question or provided responses so vague they could not be categorized as above. This discord between police perceptions is hard to rationalize, though as the interviewer, I sometimes felt that participants were reluctant to discuss ethnicity which is demonstrated by those who chose to skip the questions, and could explain some of the “no” and “yes and no” responses. Given the requirements of the Human Ethics Review Board, and the right of participants to choose not to answer specific questions, it was not reasonable to push the issue with respondents. 175 Garret in Abbotsford suggested that, in the past, gangs in the Lower Mainland were predominantly Caucasian: In 13 years, I have seen a definite change in the gang culture, landscape, and tenure to violence. Originally…it was predominately your white gangs. You had your Red Scorpions, Wolf Pack, and some offshoots of Hells Angels that would be floating around. -Garrett, APD In almost two -thirds of the interviews (28 of the 44 interviews), officers communicated concerns about young South Asian men as victims and perpetrators of gang violence and noted this was an area worthy of specific and focused police attention. When asked whether the South Asian gangs were mono-ethnic, officers reasoned that, in their experiences, the upper echelon gang members were exclusively South Asian, but many of the low-level dial-a-dopers working for them were multicultural, and the gangs, were non-discriminatory in their selection. Cohen in Abbotsford perceived this as a simple business decision motivated by profit. Some (gangs) just deal with South Asians, but typically somebody wants to make money, gets a good line on the street, knows all the prostitutes, knows anybody who's a user, pushes good dope and like, that's why... when the Duhre's were alive, they would come in and they would find a Red Scorpion guy, or they'd find one of these (other) South Asian guys, and they would just sit down and go like ‘Hey listen, you’re dealing drugs in Abbotsford. I'm going to give you better drugs, it's going to be cheaper, and if somebody catches you, or somebody wants to rip you, or somebody questions you, you now work for the Duhre's. And, what the Duhre's have is all this backing throughout BC. So, a lot of guys were like ‘Yeah, I'm all over that’. -Cohen, APD Matt in Abbotsford reasoned that even historical ideas about South Asian gangs may have mis-portrayed the willingness of members of those gangs to move beyond ethnic lines: I think that was the prevalent misconception even when the gang task force [IGTF] started that there were only Indo-Canadian gangs, and Asian gangs. Yes, the core group may be single ethnicity, but I will guarantee that if they had any motivation to earn greater profits…they will expand their horizons, and have anybody work for them, or with them. The Independent Soldiers were predominantly thought to be South Asian, well, who the heck thought they would ever approach a white organization like the HA? -Matt, APD The Hells Angels in BC have been somewhat progressive in their recruiting and membership, which is uncharacteristic and counter to the tenets of the organization worldwide. McConnell (2015) maintained that, as an organization, the world charter of the Hells Angels demands mono-ethnicity. However, the Chapters in BC have accepted an African Canadian, and a Filipino as full members, and have long established business networks with the South Asian groups, as well as other ethnic groups (McConnell, 2015). In the interviews with the police for 176 this research, the Hells Angels patching in a South Asian member was perceived as a local phenomenon. This distinction is interesting because, by and large, in other places, outlaw motorcycle gangs were structurally considered to be organized crime rather than gangs. In the last 5 years, what comes as a surprise to me is South Asian individuals getting high ranking positions within the Hells Angels. Buck Sandhu was the first South Asian member, in the Haney chapter two South Asian guys there have their bottom rockers… I think for a club like the Hells Angels, it’s simply the ability to sell more drugs, insulate themselves. But, traditionally they would never have [accepted] any type of ethnicity. -Ian, Surrey RCMP Of note, in August 2019, full patch Hells Angel Suminder Grewal was shot and killed while sitting in his Dodge Viper in a South Surrey Starbucks Drive-Thru. The murder occurred just after 9am in a busy shopping area, and gained national media attention, with prominent photos of the victim wearing his full patch vest published across numerous media outlets. Suminder Grewal is reported to have formalized the business relationship between the Hells Angels and the South Asian ‘Brothers Keepers’ Gang (Bolan, Brown, & Eagland, 2019). Efforts to gather police perceptions regarding the role of ethnicity, police responses across all three jurisdictions suggested that gangs in those jurisdictions are at least minimally multicultural, which was consistent with McConnell’s (2015) findings, but remained counter to what police in BC perceived to know and understand to be the case elsewhere in Canada and the US. Kevin in Surrey suggested that the development of multicultural gangs was a function of being raised in a multicultural society. Certainly, there are multi-ethnic gangs that have been present here in the city. There are certain elements of non-specified organized crime groups, if we could kind of use that term, where you have something that is not simply an ethnically based group, such as Vietnamese organized crime or a South Asian organized crime group. Instead, you know, groups of people that have kind of grown up together or been kind of longer-term associates coming from various ethnicities that were together for a period of time out of convenience. Their activity is certainly consistent with organized crime. They may not be long standing; they’re a group that was formed out of convenience but Surrey is very much independent… I have been speaking to a number of people that are engaged with the criminal element. If you’re someone who keeps your head down in that world and you do your best not to make waves, and not to draw undue police attention, and not to run awry of a more prevalent organized crime groups, you could make a lot of money here. - Kevin, Surrey RCMP Though South Asian gangs have a long history in Vancouver, the presence of South Asian gangs in the Lower Mainland suburbs of Abbotsford and Surrey was considered by Elena in Abbotsford to be a more recent development in response to the destabilization of the more traditional gangs in those areas. 177 It seems to me that the Lower Mainland gangs are primarily the South Asians trying to take control of the drug trade after the Bacons lost, and the UN is broken as well. So, with those two gangs not completely gone, the South Asians gangs are trying to fight to get control of the drug trade. Within Townline Hill, there's the two branches that we know work against each other. Alongside that, we still have UN/Scorpion people trying to continue business while the ‘big wigs’ have either left or are in jail. -Elena, APD Cohen in Abbotsford suggested that the South Asian gangs emerging today are dissimilar to both the South Asian gangs of the past, such as the Dhak/Duhre crime group, and the gangs that ruled the area previously, notably the Red Scorpions, United Nations gang, and, to a lesser extent, the Independent Soldiers. The South Asians haven't been around that long... when a kid is 19, and he gets a kilo of coke, or heroin, he wants to start a dial-a-dope line. So, he goes out, he starts dealing, he doesn't really know what he's doing, he's never been immersed in that culture, and somebody wants to come rip his line, he’s like ’I'll shoot at you’, right? That's not what the Duhres did before. That's not what the Bacons did. We would watch them meet about lines that were operating. And, they would work it out, and resolve it. And, if they didn't, then someone would make a decision, and say ‘You know what? That guy needs to go’. Those are kind of the differences. -Cohen, APD The suggestion was often that the blending of ethnicities in Lower Mainland gangs was a two-way street. The results of these interviews suggested that most gangs in the Lower Mainland included a mix of ethnicities. Many officers suggested that police agencies were experiencing significant cultural and communication barriers related to policing the South Asian communities they serve. The next section will offer background information intended to contextualize what is perceived to be a serious policy concern in the Lower Mainland (as previously examined in Chapter Two); namely the disproportionate representation of young South Asian men as victims of gang violence. Police Perceptions of Non-Traditional Risk Factors Many officers expressed an understanding of the risk factors for gang membership that exists in the literature and stated without reservation that many of those risk factors did not apply in the context of Lower Mainland gangs. Redd Alert and a few other groups do have some presence here, but it is not big and the argument with First Nations groups, especially the ones on the horrid reservations, is that, life is shit, life is hard. This is the option that I have, so I am going to take it. But, a lot of the Indo [South Asian] groups, even the Bacons too, you look at them like: Mom and Dad had some alcohol problems, and they weren't the most upstanding people, but they were not the worst either. Affluence, they [Bacon Brothers] had some affluence, with the Indo groups too, a lot of them come from affluence…. and this is a decision they make because they want to do it; it is not something that is thrust upon them. 178 This is a combination of not getting punished at home, maybe a little bit of, from both cultures, from letting boys do whatever they want to do. -Patrick, Surrey RCMP Police officers identified non-traditional risk factors, where young people were becoming involved in the gang lifestyle not as a survival measure or to avoid economic marginalization or to escape some other challenges, but because they wanted to, and saw it as desirable. McConnell (2015) concluded that gangs in BC were not characterized by young, ethnic, marginalized youth, but composed of ‘upper-class youth engaged in the lifestyle for a hedonistic accumulation of wealth and power’ (p.41). In 2019, the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley conducted a consultation for Strategies on Violence Prevention and Community Safety. Representatives from the Abbotsford School District, Abbotsford Community Services, the John Howard Society, BC Corrections, the University of the Fraser Valley, and the Correctional Service of Canada participated. The consultation findings concluded that non-traditional risk factors in the South Asian community included access to household wealth, cultural deference to male child, rebellion against authoritarian parenting style, parent-child schisms, hyper-masculine clan, and caste pride (p.51). McConnell (2015) suggested that there has long been a strong attraction to the gang lifestyle in BC. This attraction existed because, historically, gang members in the Lower Mainland have been treated like celebrities and catered to like VIP’s by establishment staff. This sentiment was expressed in many of the interviews with both Oakley from Abbotsford and Thomas from Surrey suggesting that, in recent years, South Asian youth were affected by non-traditional risk factors. South Asian gangs in Abbotsford, they are generally affluent and they are from … nice homes in the nice part of the city… and they are recruited for… completely different reasons, it’s not like impoverished portions of a city that band together and form a gang…It appears to be that there are people who make money and are able to exert influence over younger… men who want fancy cars, bling, pretty girls. They see the older guys with that…and… the ‘street cred’ that the older guys are able to get by shootings, stabbings, that sort of thing. These young guys feel like it’s something to aspire too, so it is a pride and honor-based system. It's more of a social association, like crews, groups of friends, people who are growing up together, and committing crime together, and sticking up for each other when there are turf wars or violence… You choose (to be a gang member) in the South Asian side. I do not think so much the Red Scorpion side, that can be addiction, and that can be how you grew up, and your background…the South Asian gangs, like the Sidhu and Sandhu group and the Grewal group, basically chose to be a gangster, you choose. -Oakley, APD 179 I am noticing [they] have very well-off parents who work really hard, who whether they are first, second, or third generation Canadians, but have worked hard, have a good house, decent money, and they shouldn’t... and in other communities probably they wouldn’t…be in the situation they are in. -Thomas, Surrey RCMP Dave in Surrey expressed surprise and frustration in conducting investigations of violent, prolific gangsters who lived in nice homes with their parents: Clay Roueche didn’t live with his Mommy, right? So, it is a different dynamic in investigating and dealing with them, with everything. -Dave, Surrey RCMP Experiences of young South Asian men becoming gang involved, despite lifestyles of affluence living in homes in good neighborhoods, were communicated by Alexander in Surrey and Tyson in Abbotsford. The majority of the families have money… they live in these huge homes in Newton and Whalley. Their families have money, right? And, I don’t think they seem to care, obviously they care about their families, but they just let their kids do whatever they want…. It is difficult because they are not kids at risk, they go home to million dollar homes every day…there’s million-dollar homes that are being shot at…quite often. Not because they’re poor or low income; they’re in it solely because of the gang life and…making money even though they have it. -Alexander, Surrey RCMP There is something else….it is not economically driven. I mean it’s, in a way, it’s…it is a business…. But it is not that they are trying to escape poverty. -Tyson, APD Patrick in Surrey expressed bafflement at the choice to participate in the gang lifestyle despite wealth, affluence, and family and community support, expressing their perception that the choice to become gang-involved was consistently perceived as being rational and calculated as a function of ego or bravado, young men trying to prove themselves. When we equate gang violence and [think] that they are fighting over the corners…. It’s not Baltimore…. This isn’t ‘The Wire’, they are not fighting over one specific corner. I think they may use that as a pretext for why they are fighting, but I do not believe that is why they fight. They fight because they want their names to ring out; they want to be known as Bindy Johal, they want to be known as the Bacon brothers. That’s what they want, to be known… -Patrick, Surrey RCMP Nayar (2004) examined this notion of reputation and power and suggested that the expectations and material pressures placed on young South Asian men was an issue of reputation in the community, colloquially known as the family’s izzat. She concluded that although izzat was a pan-Indian value, it was ‘particularly esteemed’ and ‘powerful’ among warrior castes, such as Punjabi Sikhs (Nayar, 2004, p.48). In this concept of izzat, young South Asian men were 180 expected to bring honour to the family by demonstrating traditional family values. However, Nayar (2004) concluded that in Vancouver’s Punjabi community, izzat had been redefined creating a situation where young men were experiencing ‘considerable pressure to acquire material goods for status’ (p.176). This pressure for success seemed to be influencing young South Asian men earlier in life, and both Jenna in Surrey and Cohen in Abbotsford expressed concern about the younger ages being recruited into gangs. South Asian individuals…they are not dealing because they have to out of necessity. They are dealing based on a kind of power and prestige…they come from good families. It is not that they are suffering… whatsoever. So, you are seeing sort of the drug trade sort of change a little bit you are seeing younger kids getting involved, so you are getting the 14, 15, 16-year-olds at an early age being recruited in schools and they can be recruited through familial connections. -Jenna, Surrey RCMP To this end, the brazen nature of violence, the bravado, and the chaos were all hallmarks used in describing South Asian gang members. You know, they [South Asians] war with one another…and, they have no issue using violence. There’s a little bit different mentality… a pack mentality…They will shoot into crowds, they will shoot at [a] garage, they will shoot at houses, a lot of our drive-bys are like that…to intimidate… Unfortunately, innocent people get hit. Whereas if you look at Hells Angels, traditionally, in the past, they would target someone specifically and kill. -Cohen, APD Tyakoff (2003) noted that there is a sense of entitlement, machismo, and bravado that seems to be supported by family members reinforcing a lack of social responsibility among youth. This was supported by Oakley in Abbotsford, and Sandra in Surrey: There are groups, roaming groups of gangs looking for each other at times, a lot of the Townline violence is young men with a lot of testosterone, alcohol, and big egos. They got their egos bruised, and that is what it comes down to, a lot of it. Some of it has to do with drug turf, a lot of it is …very stupid and they will go from zero to shooting. -Oakley, APD Choice is what directs you, not necessarily your circumstances, because you always have a choice. And then, a cultural shift, in terms of at least the South Asian community realizing that their children are not angels, and they need to take responsibility for that, and ask questions about where their kids are… -Sandra, Surrey RCMP This narrative of the unwillingness in the South Asian community to critically examine the behavior of young men, and the notion of the importance in the South Asian community attributed to ‘looking good’ was taken up by Heather Frost (2010a) in her dissertation focused on young South Asian men at what she called ‘Getting By High School’ in Surrey. Her research concluded that the ‘push’ to be ‘very successful’ with the ‘fancy cars’ and ‘fancy houses’ had 181 many young men asking themselves: how am I going to get this money and how am I going to get it fast? (Frost, 2010a, p.203). Moreover, Frost (2010a) suggested that the emphasis on image and the equation of material affluence with respect resulted in a situation where some members of the community failed to question the sources of wealth. More than half of the police officers interviewed (28 of the 44) addressed perceptions of challenges or concerns related to parenting. Patrick in Surrey noted that there seemed to be a generation of parents willing to give everything to their children. His Mom said something that really stuck out to me, she goes ‘I work 2 jobs to give him everything’. And I am like ‘That’s your problem!’ Nobody respects things that are given. I have three kids, and if you keep giving them stuff, they want more stuff. It’s when they have a level of respect for what they’ve got, then that’s what transcends. So, she is trying to do what is right, as a parent I feel like I want to give them this and that, but that is not the answer. That is what is allowing them to think ‘I am entitled to all of this because she has been giving me all this’. When you think you are entitled, and you have not had to work for anything, that is the problem. ‘I work so hard to give him everything’ that, I think, is the problem. -Patrick, Surrey RCMP An Abbotsford member working in prevention and intervention efforts offered some insights analyzing the risks perceived to be present in the South Asian community. He suggested that lack of awareness among parents and the community, along with a tacit belief that their sons were doing the right thing resulted in a situation where risk for gang activity had become prevalent. The theme of community denial also appeared in Frost’s (2010a) work, where she concluded that, while much of the community may be aware that their young men were criminally involved, this reality remained largely unacknowledged as most community members were more interested in maintaining the family’s reputation and, therefore, were content to promote the illusion that everything was alright. Back in the 90s, when we knew about some of the South Asian violence, especially in the Vancouver area, you had to go out and look for it. You had to go out and seek it. You would have to say, ‘I want that lifestyle’. But what you are finding now, is that more and more, young people are surrounded by it. They do not have to go out and seek it, it is just around, so it can become very tempting. That is why you need parental controls, the community involvement, that is why you need the volunteering. It is huge; it is very, very important…having that parental supervision. If you look at where technology is today, some of these parents may not know what is happening, and not to fault them, they may think, ‘Oh my son is just playing on the computer or studying’. They do not know, and if you can’t read or write, and you are out there working hard with good intentions for your kids…Even in these forums, we talked about supervision versus parenting. What is happening is sometimes you see, they are very blessed in terms of extended family systems where the grandparents can look after the kids, but that is just supervision; that is not parenting. -Jody, APD 182 Frederic in Surrey suggested that lack of parental monitoring is to blame. It’s starting at the house level where the parents have no control and the kids are left, I don’t wanna say neglected, but the parental guidance and supervision is not there, so once you’re missing that key element in a child’s life, I think they’re subjected into a different vortex and different world then it becomes very difficult to bring them back. -Frederic, Surrey RCMP Both Cohen and Elena in Abbotsford articulated that concerns that many of the young South Asian men they had interacted with showed a lack of respect for their parents. We’ve gone and talked to parents of major players, and the kids will be there [that are involved in violent shootings], and they tell their Mom and Dad ‘Fuck you, fuck off, don’t come here; I will take care of this’. And they’ll say [to the police] ‘Fuck you, you’re not talking to my parents’. And, the parents bow down to him... The parents drive an 82 Toyota Corolla, and the kid, who’s 19, drives a brand-new Cadillac Escalade. -Cohen, APD Boys in South Asian families are highly regarded. They get fancy vehicles, fancy cars. Not everybody; some boys come from good families where the Dad works hard and the mom works hard and they learn. Some are not, and these kids get whatever they want…they just completely don’t believe it and the boys just say, ‘no Mom, I’m fine; I don’t know what the police are talking about’ and then they just pull the wool over their parents’ eyes. And then, we are over there trying to explain ‘Your son’s in some dangerous positions’ like ‘This is what is really happening’, and then he denies it, and then he gets shot. That’s what ends up happening, unfortunately. -Elena, APD Concerns regarding parental denial were presented when discussing the overrepresentation of South Asian men as victims and perpetrators of gang violence. I think, I honestly would say that the South Asian community is…, there’s a little bit of denial in there along that 128th street corridor. Because we’ve talked to a lot of parents and it’s you know. Some of the Dads are actually quite keen, and they try to do their best and stuff, but when the Moms get involved, they don’t want anything to do with the police. And, they shield and protect their sons so… -Grayden, Surrey RCMP I think for the South Asians, I would say complacency because you know what I just think …Dad is probably working two jobs, Mom is at home, kids run wild, and boys, as you know, control the family…we would have to go to the Dads, when we go to the homes, and the Dads would be like ‘No, no, no’. And English was an issue, so what we just found with them is they were oblivious to it, and the kids just basically run wild. And the draw for money is so much, like they [dial-a-dopers] work 12-hour shifts, they make huge money; it is so organized is that they have shifting, and how much they’re paid $400 or $500 a day. -Gene, DPD Family members really need to wake up. Cause there’s a lot of, ‘not my son, he’s not doing that’. And, it’s argumentative and challenging to a point where some of the family members are actually saying, ‘you’re wrong, you don’t know what you’re doing; you’re not investigating my son properly; there’s no way he’s involved in that lifestyle’. 183 -Hayden, Surrey RCMP Grayden in Surrey also expressed concerns that gangs are preying upon young people remained an important feature of dial-a-doping in the present context. These other groups, like the Red Scorpions and the other ones with the actual gang names, they’re profiting huge off these inexperienced kids who have no clue what they’re getting themselves into. -Grayden, Surrey RCMP Though frustration with the perceived choice to participate was echoed frequently, participants also expressed genuine concern for dial-a-dopers and the potential for their victimization. This concern for what police often described as wayward kids may be influenced by two significant events in the Lower Mainland. In March 2009, Disher Gill, 17 and Joseph Randay, 18 were kidnapped in Abbotsford, shot, and killed. Their bodies were later found in a vehicle on Sumas Mountain. It was believed that both young men, who were Grade 12 students in Abbotsford, were involved in dial-a-doping. In June 2018, another double homicide occurred when Jaskarn ‘Jason’ Singh Jhutty who was 16 years old and Jaskaran ‘Jesse’ Singh Bhangal who was 17 years old were shot and killed on the side of the road in Surrey. Though few details have been released, in their initial press release IHIT called the murders a ‘targeted’ hit leading to much speculation that these young men were portrayed in the media as being involved in low level dial-a-doping, a claim that is vehemently countered by the families of the deceased (Chan & Grindlay, 2018). As of the writing of this dissertation, all four of these murders remained unsolved. These tragedies evoked enormous concern both in the communities where the violence occurred and more broadly across the Lower Mainland. Despite the persistent levels of violence, Melissa in Abbotsford articulated concern about the lack of cooperation from the South Asian community which she saw as being particularly problematic when parents and family members refused to cooperate with police in major investigations, including murder files: Yes, and you are not getting that co-operation here…even the little old Asian guy that was shot in the backyard. The place had video and they were not willing to give it up... well why not? I think it’s a lot of the culture too, because all of these are young boys, and of course, in South Asian culture, young boys cannot do anything wrong. They need to start parenting their kids, and not giving them fast cars, and (start) giving them shit for stuff that they do. Whereas, you look at the Bacons, maybe not the best example because Mom and Dad are just as crooked, but you know I am sure you or I, if our son came home, and I found out he was joining [a gang], I would kick his ass to the moon and back, and say ‘You are not coming back in this house!’. So, I think that is a huge difference, is cultural and parenting. -Melissa, APD 184 Thomas in Surrey noted that there seemed to be a cultural disconnect in the South Asian community that police had yet to find a way to overcome. Three different perspectives of that: the overwhelmed Mom who is just going like ‘I do not know what to do about anything,’ the Dad who thinks he is doing everything but, in reality, is doing nothing, and then the one who is playing the blame game. So that is kind of in, that, I guess South Asian community, that is kind of the experience I have had with that community. Also, a lot of denying, ‘my son is not involved in anything’, ‘my son is a good boy, he does not do anything, he does not drink, he does not do this’. You are oblivious, you are either oblivious, or you are flat out lying. -Thomas, Surrey RCMP A central theme (in 28 of the 44 interviews) that emerged when I turned to the subject of investigating gangs was the suggestion that South Asian parents were sometimes perceived by police as being complicit in the criminal activity of their sons, unwilling to cooperate with police investigations, unable to recognize that their sons were at risk as a result of gang activity, and having failed to establish parental control. Oakley in Abbotsford expressed disbelief at the lack of community and individual cooperation with police following incidents of targeted violence in the neighborhood, such as drive-by shootings, was indicative of the disconnect between police and the South Asian community. I think it is a cultural issue where the community needs to decide what they want to do. I mean, I’ll tell you because we have asked for co-operation in the South Asian community and been chased out by nice, normal people. Victims of a shooting requiring a warrant for their CCTV camera’s... why would they do that? If your family member was shot, why would you demand the police get a warrant for your CCTV camera? -Oakley, APD Tara in Abbotsford demonstrated an empathic understanding for the risk to family reputation in the community when a young person became involved in crime. I think the reason why you don’t have a lot of that [family cooperation] is because the person who was shot at, everyone knows in that community, and that family, and they’re all connected. It’s my relative, it’s my cousin, and we don’t want to be embarrassed. It’s about status and it’s about being an upstanding community, and everything else. So, we kind of want to brush it under the carpet. -Tara, APD Frederic in Surrey communicated the cultural barriers he perceived as being problematic in establishing relationships of trust between the South Asian Community and police: First of all, the cooperation from the parents…most of them are, if not most, but a lot of them have come to this country as immigrants. And the trust of police coming from Punjab, India to here is not the same…there is that hesitance to be entirely fully cooperative with the police…I had one parent tell me ‘You know, if my son cooperated with you, people would know that he’s co-operating with the police, and then we may not get good wedding offers for my son’. -Frederic, Surrey RCMP 185 Oakley in Abbotsford articulated these barriers as understandable and suggested that there are many reasons why immigrants from the Punjab region of India would have a deep distrust of police: I think that in India the police are seen as corrupt, and I mean you speak to Indian guys who go back, and it is a scary place. You do not want to mess with the police there. There is zero accountability. They [the police] are there to make money, and there to do whatever they want. So, I think that fear translates here; I think it is a cultural fear. -Oakley, APD Though Oakley sounded a bit baffled, he also suggested that a potential way forward may be through community mobilization: I think on the South Asian side, I think it is a community issue less than a policing issue. I think that some of these young men are given access to such resources that allow them to live in such a way that they can support their lifestyle of drug dealing and not having to work but given access to beautiful cars. -Oakley, APD Oakley’s suggestions that this is a community issue rather than a policing issue reaffirm the potential for a way forward through a community-based public health strategy that mobilizes strategic partnerships across serving organizations. Among the police officers involved in prevention programming, the South Asian community was seen to be especially at risk by the very nature of its inter-connectedness. Though the literature would suggest that strong familial connections mitigate risk, in this case, the participation of young South Asian men in the gang lifestyle was seen to increase the risk for their siblings, cousins, and throughout the extended family dynamic. This is a generational thing, especially in the South Asian community...in the case of the Bacons - … I do not know who the Bacon’s cousins are. I am not sure if I need to know or not, but I do not know who the Bacons’ uncles or aunts are, so it is almost like a very isolated issue...But, what you are finding here is that, if you are looking at the family dynamics, it is generational. So, what sometimes can be your greatest asset, can also be your greatest liability. Joint family systems, family support, mentorship, if it is positive, it is great. But, if you get a negative element in there, it can be toxic, and it can be cancerous. So, if all of a sudden you get one son that goes into the gangster lifestyle, the younger brothers and the cousins are going to be high risk to participate in that lifestyle, and that has been proven over and over, if you look at ‘such and such brothers’, and ‘such and such brothers’. And then, what is different that I think a lot of people are not acknowledging, is that in the South Asian community we are not talking about one sibling at risk or two siblings at risk; sometimes you can have like 12 to 15 cousins. -Jody, APD Garrett in Abbotsford readily acknowledged the risk for gang activity prevalent in the South Asian community but expressed a degree of despondence as to how to address it. Officers 186 familiar with gang prevention programming articulated their concerns about the tendency for these programs to focus on the provision of social services. You know, the other piece to it too is that this is a constant discussion [about] families, and where they come from, and how the gang, unlike say L.A, where you get the Bloods and the Crips, so you got some Latino gangs who come from impoverished areas, and broken homes - this is a little bit different here in Abbotsford and the Lower Mainland gang conflict. The other piece…is, do these individuals have an outlet? …So, because the gang landscape in B.C and the communities in BC are generally, like you would really have to work to find a ghetto per se…. you really have to work at it. Like you couldn't go out to find a real ghetto in Abbotsford…You know, maybe they need some sort of youth outreach counselling, or some sort of connection programs? Or, sports type programs versus funds? When we think ‘help’ or ‘social service help’ we think of social assistance, we think of money, but money's not always the answer. I would actually argue for a lot of these guys money is not [the] answer. -Garrett, APD Garret’s recognition that the solutions may lie in the community rather than with the police is salient in considerations of what exactly police organizations should be expected to do to prevent otherwise well-adjusted kids with social and socioeconomic capital from engaging in drug dealing and violence. Though many (28 of the 44) participants spoke of their concerns related to young South Asian men with non-traditional risk factors engaging in gang activity, River spoke of the reluctance in Abbotsford to openly address the issue because of concerns about backlash from the community: I think there is definitely a sensitivity or concern that we will be seen racially profiling. Somebody needs to stand up and say something. The bosses need to say ‘No, we are not’. Here is the problem (of gang violence disproportionately affecting South Asian youth), and I am sorry if it does not sound good. -River, APD This was echoed in Surrey where Jenna described the overrepresentation of South Asians as victims of violence in that community the ‘elephant in the room’: A lot of times you feel bad because you say ‘South Asian’ and they don’t want you to say it but, how can I not? It's like the elephant in the room. You won't allow me to talk about the issue. We are very politically correct, we are saying ‘No, it affects everyone’. It does affect everyone, but unfortunately you see a lot of South Asians involved in gangs. And, how do you deal with that? I don't know. Culturally, how do we deal with that? I do not know. I am not the best person to talk about it, I am white. I don't know the answer, I do not know culturally how that works. I know that when my brother was dragged home by the police, my brother paid the consequences from my father. I do not think that necessarily happens in any culture anymore, so I do not know. -Jenna, Surrey RCMP In each of the three jurisdictions, there exist large South Asian diasporas. Concerns around lack of trust between police and the community were communicated noting that it became especially hard when there was a language barrier. As noted previously, officers 187 suggested that there were insufficient police resources able to effectively communicate and work with the South Asian community. Both Frederic and Gene in Delta identified the need for additional Punjabi speaking members to address the ongoing need for police to be able to provide fulsome services to the large South Asian diasporas in the communities they serve. We have to get better at reflecting the mosaic of our community. We’re going have to look at South Asian females, South Asian males, just give the community in North Delta that demographic. It’s tough, we’re trying to track it, but it’s tough to get them in. That would help us long term. Right now, we have about 15 members that speak Punjabi, and we’ve got 200 officers here so it’s lousy, its 7%. -Frederic, DPD Maybe if we were to have more South Asian cops to talk to these kids, so they could really talk. We just don’t have the resources; we need the manpower. We need to start educating these kids early. – Gene, DPD Though it was suggested that police services would benefit from hiring additional officers with Punjabi language skills, officers recognized that in practice, it is not necessarily easy. In reflecting on hiring South Asian Police officers, Jody from APD said: Some can speak the language, and some cannot. Some can speak the language with some depth, and some can't. So, that is kind of what you end up running into. And, in all fairness to the recruiting department - you are looking for a person who has all those traits, and it is hard to find those 10 (new officers), no matter what ethnicity you are. It is hard to find a good candidate. -Jody, APD In recognizing the challenges inherent in efforts to hire additional police officers, Flynn suggested that perhaps the goals of opening the lines of communication between the police and the South Asian community could be achieved through other measures: We need some very strong South Asian liaisons to work with us to reach out to these families. Or for us to have more connection with South Asian families in Abbotsford, and explain to them that ‘this is really happening’. -Flynn, APD Flynn’s observations support the use of a public health model in which members of the South Asian communities could become trusted liaisons, able to provide non-enforcement support and care to families experiencing challenges. The police officers interviewed in this research repeated McConnell’s (2015) findings that gangs in BC are unlike those traditionally examined in the literature, lacking outwards signs of gang affiliation, without clear divisions along ethnic or cultural lines, and not geographically defined, which presents jurisdictional issues given the complex nature of policing in BC’s Lower 188 Mainland. An understanding of the organization and structure, along with the perceived chaos that has predominantly characterized the violent events of recent years, is an important starting point in situating these efforts across time and space in the Lower Mainland. By and large, the officers interviewed for this research suggested that voracious desire for wealth accumulation through importation and sales of illicit narcotics is at the very foundation of BC’s gang problem and is the primary motivator for gang participation, particularly among those young men who identify with the ethos of late capitalism unwilling to achieve such success through traditional methods. Indeed, officers suggested that this hedonistic desire for predatory accumulation of wealth is the source of risk for those young men who come from reasonably affluent or upper middle-class homes, and don’t otherwise experience the traditional risk factors noted in the literature. As noted earlier, this research is not comparative so I am unable to verify the veracity of the assertion that gangs here are putatively different than elsewhere as asserted by McConnell (2015). That said, the perceptions offered by police officers throughout this chapter would suggest that the gang landscape in BC is unlike that which is described in the vast literature on traditional street gangs. This has important consequences because it is impossible to mitigate risk that doesn’t exist through traditional gang prevention, intervention, and suppression programs, which is the focus of the next chapter. 189 Chapter 6. Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression Programs Police officers in every jurisdiction were asked about their organizations’ efforts in gang prevention, intervention, and suppression. In every interview, officers were asked to outline what they felt was working and what was not working, and why. Their answers outlining police efforts and their perceptions of efficacy were then mapped onto primary prevention, secondary intervention, and tertiary suppression strategies. The contribution of this chapter is to assemble the perceptions and practical experiences of the police officers tasked with the development and implementation of gang prevention, intervention, and suppression responses to gang violence in BC’s Lower Mainland. Policing Gangs through Primary Prevention Programs Intuitively, there is the expectation that police focus the majority of their attention on suppression strategies. To this end, the level of effort and number of resources the police put into prevention programming was surprising. As described previously in Chapter Three, prevention programs include the work of School Liaison Officers (SLO’s), school talks, engaging with the community through community forums and events, media engagement strategies, surveillance cameras, and anti-gang campaigns. Among the officers interviewed and engaged in prevention efforts, Shane in Abbotsford exhibited an enormous level of commitment. He disclosed that the prevention efforts they were engaged with were done voluntarily in addition to the regular duties of his position. He shared many stories of the prevention efforts taken up by police, saying: Why I think you see so much of this outreach and prevention stuff, is because we have a problem. There is no guarantee that it will work, but we have the potential that it will work. If we do not take advantage of that, then we are just stupid. -Shane, APD While some officers across the three jurisdictions expressed positive perceptions of police prevention programs, others were more cynical. This may seem to be a negative perspective, but given the experiences of these police officers, they believed it to be a rational and calculated choice to maintain a healthy level of skepticism when thinking about gang-involved youth. Cohen with APD offered the opinion that for many gang-involved youth, police interactions were unlikely to have a positive net effect: 190 They are very affluent, they are 100%... all about not having a job. They think it's cool because they see these rappers making money doing this, and they all have hot chicks, and for some reason...for some reason, people think that ‘Hey when I'm 18 or 19, dial-a-doping’s cool. Pushing drugs is cool. I can make a lot of money, and the girls want to be with me’ …And it happens right off the bat. You don't go to these kids and you know ‘end gang life’... you don't get any traction talking to these kids... there's no program you can give them. You're not saying ‘You know what buddy, I'll take you out, let's go play basketball. I'll take you out, let's go for a meal. I will make you a better person. Why don't you come down to the YMCA we have a program that runs there’ …These kids are like ‘Fuck you dude, I got an Escalade’. -Cohen, APD The frustration expressed by Cohen does not seem to be that kids in general are not susceptible to positive influences. Instead, it seems that his perspective is that affluent youth involved in gang activity are doing so by choice, and do not experience the traditional risk factors best suited for prevention programming. As such, he seemed to believe that the police were incapable of effecting prosocial influences. Cohen went on to articulate that from his perspective, there is one form of prevention that may be helpful: I think if you tried to prevent it…the angle would be showing what would happen when they became 25, or 26, or 27. And they were broke, they had been kidnapped. They'd had their money taken away. Their girlfriends are not with them, or they've been killed, or their friends have been killed… -Cohen, APD He argued that the best prevention may be efforts to show youth what life in the future will likely look like, particularly given the egregiously long list of lives taken in the Lower Mainland’s gang conflict over the past 30 years. Cohen’s assertions assume rational foresight, which may be problematic given the often-risk-taking nature of young men focused on immediacy rather than the future. Dave in Surrey recognized this noting: A lot of individuals in that lifestyle, they don’t care. A lot of them see themselves almost as television characters, ‘I’m Scarface I’ll live forever, so what I die in a hail of bullets'. It’s crazy …but that’s what they believe -Dave, Surrey RCMP While both Cohen and Dave seemed a bit spiritless about prevention efforts, Tyson, also an officer with APD suggested that there just might be hope: I do not necessarily think people change through enforcement…there needs to be that realization that there is a better way and some people will never... the light bulb will never come on right? But there are other people that it just might. -Tyson, APD Like Tyson, Matt offered the perspective that prevention was about opportunities. Matt seemed to acknowledge some of the same concerns expressed by Cohen about the likelihood of 191 successful prevention with current dialers, but suggested hope that the next generation of dialers could be influenced through the prevention efforts of police: If we start ignoring your dial-a dopers, if we start ignoring more your ‘street level’ dealers, then we just feed into this. These are the people that aspire to move up. Somebody sitting in a classroom saying ‘I do not want to sit here and toil away’, or ‘I am in grade 2 my cousin who is 10 has a cousin…. look at that escalade, look at that house’. There are still going to be those people, youth, adults, that say ‘You know, there is a better way of me making money, and it does not really involve me running around carrying a gun, I’ll just store this here, and I’ll feed it to that group of people, so they can go and flog it, and then I just take the money and give it to this group or up here’. So, there is a fourth layer. The challenge for law enforcement is to use ‘this’ in order to prevent ‘that’. -Matt, APD Jenna with Surrey RCMP suggested that prevention efforts had been enhanced by the greater awareness among police officers of the potential impacts of prevention activities that she perceived was the result of officer’s having a higher level of education: I think we have a better-educated member than we have had before where they realize the idea of crime prevention and true crime prevention …making a difference. You are sort of like the town sheriff of the school, and you are really getting to know to the kids and teachers. You are in there, and you are actually trying to sell an idea in that preventative approach. -Jenna, Surrey RCMP The emphasis on prevention efforts in Surrey was echoed by Ian: We’ve had a little more success with more programs, education, and prevention and the things that we’re trying to do, because we’ve publicly said ‘we cannot arrest ourselves out of this problem’. So, we’re seeing some impact, right? We’re now concentrating much more on elementary schools, making sure we’re better aligned with high schools, parent help, youth line, we’re being proactive. Identify the ones that are causing the problems, and not just deal with them, go to the parents. -Ian, Surrey RCMP Though not all of the individual police officers I interviewed were convinced that prevention efforts would be successful, all of the organizations reported being actively engaged in gang prevention programming with dedicated long-term commitments to programming, and in some cases, allocated resources. School Liaison Officers Police officers in every jurisdiction remarked that School Liaison officers were the key to successful prevention strategies. In Delta, Frederic suggested that DPD’s engaged school liaison officers offered a real return on investment: We had really good South Asian officers that were pretty sharp, and slick, and knew ‘who is who’, and acted. -Frederic, DPD 192 When asked about prevention efforts in Abbotsford, Grayden suggested the police liaisons in schools were critically important because they allow the officer to understand who is at risk or engaged with gangs. Given their access to youth, these officers were able to offer insight and intelligence that might otherwise be difficult to come by: They might not always know who the gangs are, or who the players are, but I think it is very important, critically important because they know who they are dealing with. Who they are as kids, in relation to what gangs…So that is one of the areas I'd say we do a decent job, and I would continue to push for informed frontline officers. -Grayden, APD In Abbotsford, Elena articulated the critical importance of police building trust within the communities they served by suggesting that the school liaison program was correctly suited to foster those relationships: Building that trust with the public, and these kids is super, super important. Linking in with the parents too, when we think it is important and the kid is really going off the rails…and making sure they know what is going on. Because I would want to know if it was my daughter. -Elena, APD Though the primary focus of school liaison officers is students, building trust with parents is a corollary activity. Efforts in this arena included partnering with schools to offer information sessions for parents in the evenings, after their regular working hours. In each of the jurisdictions, the school liaison program was perceived by officers to be an important component of primary prevention strategies. As noted in Chapter Three, few studies on the efficacy of School Liaison Officers exist in the literature. As such, the development of evaluation measures to capture the success of the SLO program across the breadth of defined activities and to identify areas for improvement should be an important focus of police organizations for two reasons in particular. First, in an environment of fiscal austerity, data to support spending initiatives is crucial to assure the program maintains its funding. Second, if it can be empirically established that the efforts of SLO’s demonstrate results in gang prevention programming efforts, there would be the requisite data available to support additional resources being allocated in schools. Beyond this school liaison positions, each organization spoke of additional school talks conducted by officers beyond the SLO’s including those from dedicated gang enforcement units, which will be examined in detail in the next section. 193 School Talks Across the jurisdictions, police officers reported that their organizations were engaged in school talks. Officers in Abbotsford recounted a long history of school talks, starting in September of 2009 with Operation Impact, an hour-long presentation delivered to more than 6,500 students at all of Abbotsford’s high schools (Squires & Plecas, 2009, p.13). Then Police Chief Bob Rich spoke at every one of these sessions with Sergeant Mike Novakowski, and each talk featured a 15-minute presentation by a former gang member (Operation Reclamation, APD, n.d.). The message focused on decision-making and the recognition that a number of small decisions can potentially draw young people into difficult situations. This message of making positive choices was delivered using a positive strengths-based approach intended to mirror many existing deterrence programs that included building relationships and offering a balance of support and enforcement tactics (Squires & Plecas, 2013, p.14). Harper, an officer with Abbotsford Police Department, spoke proudly of these efforts: Our chief was part of a campaign where he went to all the schools and gave an actual presentation to the kids in the schools, talking about gangs, and drugs, and violence, and things like that. That was really good, it was well received. -Harper, APD In the years that followed Operation Impact, the Abbotsford Police Department undertook various other campaigns, including Operation Veritas (2010) that was a series of short anti-gang videos and Operation Impact 2, which was a redesign of the original curriculum for delivery to 5,500 middle school students. Abbotsford Police also introduced five additional initiatives including Operation Acorn presented to 8,800 elementary school students focusing on a message of making good choices, and Operation Congraduation, which stressed the importance of school completion and ‘congradulated’ academic achievement for graduates in all Abbotsford high schools by posting messages on billboards and buses. The process then restarted with Operation Vector presentations in 2011 encouraging high school students to adopt a positive prosocial lifestyle. These presentations included more up-to-date information adding local examples (Squires and Plecas, 2013, p.15). Of note, much of this work is still going on. When I visited Elena in her office at APD, she was getting prepared for an upcoming school presentation: We have a grade 8 gang presentation which I was just looking at, actually. The presentation is very candid about the realities of gangs, and gang life, and what that looks like. And, drug use and why when you do join a gang you are either going to end up in jail, or dead, or addicted, because those 194 are the three options for you. So, we are really pointed when we give that presentation, to make sure the kids really understand that you have a choice and I think that has been very good. -Elena, APD Another APD member was telling me about his participation in ongoing anti-gang talks in schools. He was clearly proud of the work being done by APD, particularly the ongoing invitation to an ex-gang member to participate in APD presentations: They have respect. Even though they might be out of the game, they still carry a bit of clout. To have somebody come in that was a gangster, I think, it does carry some weight. And, people will listen more than just some police officer talking about it, or a teacher, right? If you actually have someone who's been there, and was part of this, I think that carries clout. And I know it has, by talking to people. So, I think there is a lot of benefit to it. -Dylan, APD Shane, an APD member who has many years of experience and reported being deeply involved in policing the conflict of 08/09 in Abbotsford was boastful in describing the work of APD coming out of that conflict: A lot of the stuff that CFSEU has done, we joke here, because we did it first, but they have a bigger platform. Every time we see a news release or whatever that comes out of CFSEU that is prevention based we always go ‘Yeah, we did that 5 years ago’. And we like that, we like that you know? In the cop world, you do not get territorial about your ideas, especially the good ideas. You want people to take them, and use them, and if their stuff is ever so slightly different, but built on the same theme then at the end of the day...that’s great. You are not going to arrest your way out of this problem, there has to be other pieces to it, we firmly ascribe to that… So, I certainly like the way we have approached that. I think that we have been outside the box in a lot of the things that we have done. -Shane, APD In Surrey, respondents working with the then newly implemented Surrey Gang Enforcement Team (SGET) spoke of their efforts to modify the CFSEU-BC’s End Gang Life presentation to be more Surrey focused, which they began offering in schools as Shattering the Image presentations. Since its inception, SGET was out in full force building relationships with the school district and setting up presentations. The Surrey School District is the largest in the province with more than 125 schools and more than 72,000 students enrolled in the 2018/2019 school year.45 Jenna, with Surrey RCMP, spoke fondly of their relationship with the school district asserting: 45 https://www.surreyschools.ca/ParentServices/ParentInfoBrochures/Documents/Surrey%20Schools%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf 195 We have a very good school district here, they are excellent, and want to work with us…They work with us on things like fentanyl presentations. We designed a fentanyl presentation and trained all of our school liaisons on that, so they are very good, and easy to work with. They understand the aspects of working together is better than two separate entities working apart, so it was not hard at all. -Jenna, Surrey RCMP In Surrey, Grayden highlighted the importance of building relationships between police and community partners, which was realized after the Surrey School district invited members of the RCMP’s SGET on a trip to learn about prevention programming elsewhere in efforts at policy transfer: The Surrey School District invited us to go…check on some of these anti-gang prevention programs that they have in Los Angeles. So, we tagged along with them. The one thing, more than anything, that we learned from that LA trip is that we should no longer work as silos. We learned that the police need to work with the school district…we need to work with probation, we need all these partners, need to work together with one objective in mind, which is basically identifying and doing gang prevention at early ages. So, when we came back from that trip, we drafted a business plan, and we let them (senior management) know what we learned. There is a need, and we have recognized as a group that we need to go speak to (kids), and we have an operating cost to this because we are going to be utilizing...hours and overtime. As long as it’s documented and it’s clear, upper management is really good at approving it, and giving us that latitude here. -Grayden, Surrey RCMP Oscar, a newly appointed SGET member at the time of this research, spoke highly of the school presentations and noted the importance of having the right police officers with the right street credentials or reputation delivering the school presentations on gangs: I was a school liaison officer once too. If you’re a school liaison cop, you’re there at the dance, you're there at the assemblies, you’re there all the time, you just become Joe, and Joe is just part of being at school. If Joe is giving a presentation, but Joe hasn’t done that job, Joe has no credibility. If you bring in Bob, and Bob’s dressed like Bob dresses, and Bob tells you stories and says, ‘these are the facts’, that has a lot more power to it. -Oscar, Surrey RCMP Oscar suggested that SGET was the unit appropriately responsible for conducting presentations in schools, rather than leaving these presentations to school liaison officers. That said, not everyone interviewed was entirely positive about the utility of school presentations. Mark with the Surrey RCMP expressed some concerns: With the… presentations, I know there are some videos, and I think…we need to convince kids that this is not a good lifestyle. But, even that, it catches some people, but by then they’re already committed to this lifestyle. I guess a guy who now he realizes his time is up, his ticket is punched, now he realizes ‘oh crap I shouldn't have done this’. But, aside from watching your friends die, and almost dying yourself, at what point in time do you recognize this is a bad choice? -Mark, Surrey RCMP 196 In Delta, officers indicated that they believed their prevention efforts were successful, but pointed to the frustration in the lack of ability to prove success: We deal with youth, they leave then realize when they become my age that they want to have kids and to settle down, and that Delta is a great town. So, they move back. When you talk to them after the fact, and I’ve been around that long, so I can actually have those conversations, it’s so beneficial. There are probably five different people that have moved back…their families were using and dealing and involved in that activity, but because of the education piece, and because of the involvement…of the police officers here, they stopped. So, it’s absolute success. But, I can’t go back to management and put that in the report for the year. Management is stats driven, and our new management love numbers. They say ‘I want to hear that you talked to these 10 people, and these 10 people don’t do it (get involved in gang life)’. I can’t give that to you. That’s frustrating. -Amanda, DPD Because Delta does not have a dedicated gang enforcement unit (to be discussed in detail later in this chapter), the school liaison officers are responsible for conducting school presentations. Participants noted that they believed the SLO’s were conducting a wide variety of school presentations, not just on gangs, but also on the risks of drug use, a presentation specific to the risks related to fentanyl, as well as one on vaping. Some police officers spoke with a degree of skepticism about the presentations being done elsewhere, indicating they had seen and participated in a few of them and were not particularly impressed: Instead of saying ‘We did 86 different presentations in whatever municipality’, put some effort into the ones that you’re doing. -Gene, DPD In considering the development and implementation of gang prevention school presentations delivered by police, there is the long-standing concern that this method of information delivery has never been validated for effectiveness in preventing the behavior of concern. In order to establish best practices, evaluations of similar strategies, programs and initiatives informed by theory and research must be considered. For this reason, it is important to conduct ongoing and rigorous evaluation. With respect specifically to gang prevention, evaluation is critical because of the large body of research demonstrating that there may, in fact, be the potential for harm in well-intended prevention programs. The lack of empirical evidence to support the current practices that are common in responding to gang violence across police organization is therefore problematic. Crime prevention programming for youth is, by its very nature, always well intentioned. What is often overlooked is the potential for unintended negative outcomes. It would be prudent that police organizations seek to evaluate their school prevention programming efforts. 197 Community Engagement/Forums & Media: The Abbotsford Police Department developed and implemented a community engagement strategy alongside their school presentations in response to the 2008/2009 gang violence in that city (Operation Reclamation, APD, n.d.). Known as Operation Lodestar, these presentations were geared specifically towards parents, and offered an anti-gang message. Throughout this series of presentations, more than 2,000 Abbotsford parents attended (Operation Reclamation, APD, n.d.). Squires and Plecas (2013) outlined the five key points of communication offered in Operation Lodestar, which was designed to address risk factors and to keep children safe, including: • The importance of setting a good example. • Knowing the child’s whereabouts and activities. • Valuing the child’s education and the importance of school. • Importance of setting parental rules with clear limits and expectations. • Parental involvement in pro-social ways that promote the child’s best interest (p.15). Jody, an officer with APD who has long been embedded in community engagement, particularly with the South Asian community, spoke of more recent presentations being offered by the department: We identified a location where parents would feel comfortable. You have to be careful, you do not want to use a school, because that school does not want to be labelled as the school with the (gang) problem. And, you have to recognize that communities divide whether it is religious or political…You have to be very careful as you’re as a police officer, and need to be seen as very neutral, and it needs to be objective. You are turning up for the purpose of educating them now, but tomorrow you may be turning up for the purpose of enforcement. You have to remember what your role is as a police department. So, you want to pick out a location that is very neutral where everybody feels comfortable attending. In this case, we picked a geographically appropriate place, people can walk there. In this town, even though we are multicultural, our settlement pattern is not multicultural. So out West, we picked Apollo, and held the forum in a conference room there. When I did the Anti-Gang one, about 150 parents came out to that. -Jody, APD Apollo46 is a privately-owned community centre located in West Abbotsford, where the majority of the population is of South Asian origin. As one of the officers deeply entrenched in the community engagement efforts,47 Jody, suggested that in conducting these forums, police have 46 For those familiar with Abbotsford, Appollo Athletic Club has since changed ownership and renamed Summit Centre. 47 All of the officers specializing in these activities were interviewed for this project. I am deeply indebted to these individuals as these were the longest of my interviews, typically lasting nearly two hours. 198 an important role to play in the South Asian community and noted that it was a bit pioneering for its time: I was working as a school liaison officer and the first time we did this kind of stuff we were working with only one school because we were all working off the sides of our desks. -Jody, APD Jody suggested that it is somewhat tenuous territory for the police to offer parenting advice, as well as important information about the warning signs of drug use and abuse and dial-a-doping activity. Offering parenting advice and becoming symbolically deeply embedded in the purview and understanding of parents in their efforts to relate to their children is a precarious position for the police to put themselves in: We needed to communicate that they (teachers) are educators, who are there to educate our kids, but they are not there to raise our children. And, we realized that it was one of the first hurdles that we needed to get over. So, one of the things that we started had a counsellor and a teacher, both South Asian, and we started a series called ‘Our Children’ to start educating parents in terms of what is happening. One was called ‘The role of my daughter’ with the Moms, to educate them. We had a forum talking about some of the dynamics in schools, and the world, and peer pressure, and we also had some young grade 11 and grade 12 students come in and, the whole forum was in Punjabi. And, they talked about their issues with depression, and their hardships, and they understand the role their Mother played. They also shared with them some of the ‘tricks’… these young people are using, and what is happening in some of our schools. -Jody, APD As the years passed, APD continued conducting community forums predominantly focused on the risks presented by gangs and assisting parents in identifying and responding to early risk factors. In one of the interviews, Shane offered an interesting analysis of APD’s actions as innovative and forward-thinking: Calling out the parents, there are a lot of agencies that would not have gone anywhere near that. In fairness, there are a lot of jurisdictions that just based on the politics, two things: they would not want you to shine a light on any crime situation you have in the community because it would be bad for business, and two is that if you are going to shine that light then shine it quickly and then get away from it. We stay on message. I think the Townline Hill conflict, we have been talking about that for three years. There are a lot of communities that would go ‘okay you already talked about that, so we do not want to hear any more about it we have gone to something else’. -Shane, APD I was not immediately aware of what he was referring to and needed to ask additional clarifying questions where I learned that, in December of 2016, then Chief Bob Rich adopted a new strategy of sending personally addressed letters written in both English and Punjabi to be hand delivered by police officers to the parents of nearly 20 youth in the Abbotsford community. Baker (2016) noted that the letter from Chief Rich said that two gangs were fighting over who 199 got to sell illegal drugs in Abbotsford and attributed five murders to the conflict, including of one innocent bystander. The letter also said that another one of the five people murdered was an 18-year-old. Baker (2016) offered an excerpt from the letter, which said: Your son’s life is in critical danger. If he stays involved in gangs, he is at serious risk of being killed. As a member of one of these gangs, your son’s actions are causing other people to die. In addition, if you have other younger sons in your house, experience has shown us that they are at risk of being pulled into gangs by their older brother (para 3). Akin to many other innovative strategies implemented by Abbotsford Police, the letter gained a lot of traction with local media. Another APD member commented: I read the letter and I've always loved Abbotsford's interaction with the media. I think they do a really good job. -Patricia, APD In questioning Shane further about the media strategies of the APD, he said: I am a firm advocate of, if it is the truth, then you tell them (the media). And, if somebody phones you, and they have a question, then you answer the question. The truth fears no questions…I think relative to other jurisdictions we get a disproportionate amount of media not because we’ve got more shit going on here than in other places, but because we answer the phone. -Shane, APD Abbotsford was by no means the only jurisdiction conducting community outreach engagement forums, with officers in all three jurisdictions reporting similar efforts. In Delta, officers described their community initiatives, including holding what they called a youth violence forum, noting their reluctance to call it a gang forum. In Surrey, officers offered many examples of community engagement efforts: We did 50 community engagements where we actually picked a lot of sporting events like you know, obviously, the South Asian community is known for their big soccer tournaments, right? Last summer, I think we did 50 you know. CFSEU was with us, with End Gang Life. Our own officers, SGET we would go set up a booth, have education, prevention and just positive role models. -Ian, Surrey RCMP When asked about their perceptions of the efficacy of these practices, Garrett, an APD member suggested that the resources should be spread across the spectrum of responses in the Lower Mainland: I think you would probably have to spend it proportionately in different areas, youth strategies - one of the areas where I would really push is identifying high-risk youth. Getting informational packages and messages out to schools, having a CFSEU like strategy, and wrapping vehicles (in anti-gang messaging). Though, I don't know the success because I haven't measured it, nor have I asked for the statistics on it, but it is something that I think is worthwhile. -Garrett, APD 200 Garrett was one of the few officers who spoke about the need to measure the success of these initiatives. In none of the jurisdictions did any formal evaluation of community engagement programs occur. Anecdotally, the officers involved in the development and delivery of these community engagement efforts spoke of their perceived successes; however, this is not intended to suggest that rigorous evaluations are not required. Still, the lack of evaluation was not surprising given that there was not sufficient funding provided to these programs. This said, and given the results of the longitudinal evaluations indicating the potentially iatrogenic effects of programs like D.A.R.E, it is important that despite the difficulties inherent in conducting evaluations these efforts must be undertaken for all police-based intervention or prevention programs. Surveillance Cameras The use of police-owned surveillance cameras installed in the residential neighborhoods of known violent offenders is a frequently deployed strategy in the Lower Mainland. The Abbotsford Police Department, in the height of the 2008/2009 gang conflict publicly and overtly posted video cameras pointed directly at the front door of the Bacon residence. The officers interviewed in this study said that this idea came to them after there were a number of attempted homicides against the Bacons at their residence and at the local shopping center. The Bacons lived on a cul-de-sac less than a block from an elementary school, and police believed that by posting the cameras there, it would deter any future violent attempts at the residence. The use of surveillance cameras continues to be a primary preventative response across police organizations, with officers in all three jurisdictions indicating that overt surveillance cameras with signage was a strategy they employed: There are a number of cameras up, to address gang violence. The recent research shows that there is less specific crime in those areas where the cameras are, but they (criminals) are just displaced to another area. Here's the thing, I think fixed cameras are a decent strategy, and I know specifically that we have solved a handful of offenses as a result of the cameras. I would argue that there has been a reduction of incidences in those areas where they have cameras... I think…it's probably unnerving for the individuals when the camera is in their neighborhood. -Garrett, APD The City of Surrey has developed and implemented a proactive public safety initiative wherein residents and businesses can register their willingness to share data from surveillance cameras in the event of an incident. Known as Integrated Resources for Investigations and Safety 201 (IRIS), the project is described as a voluntary camera registry leading to a secure database maintained by the City of Surrey intended to assist police in speeding up evidence gathering capabilities. Without this type of database, when a crime is committed, police traditionally go door to door canvassing for information. By registering cameras, citizens and business owners can help speed up investigations as the police will know where cameras are located that might have recorded evidence of the crime. In effect, this allows citizens and business owners to directly contribute to public safety.48 At the time of these interviews, the city of Surrey was the only one of the three jurisdictions to have such a program. The Townline Hill area of Abbotsford has been under overt police surveillance since the summer of 2014, with police installing additional cameras as they deemed necessary to deter serious and violent crime. Several officers suggested that they did not think that the cameras had the intended deterrent effect; however, their evidence gathering capabilities had been enhanced in the wake of violence in that area: We have 13 cameras using both overt and covert resources all over Townline. I think one of the challenges that we have with Townline that we did not have with East Abbotsford is that we knew who the players were, we knew where the hierarchy was, and in the case of the Bacons, we knew where their house was. You were really only homing in on one house, and the people that were coming and going from that house. So, it was like Pablo Escobar. You’ve got one dude, and then you know that everybody that interacts with him in any way, shape, or form is in the same business…What we have in Townline is not quite the same. You have a few main players, and we have been as bold as setting up cameras directly outside the homes of these individuals, with the view that we are either going to capture all the information and evidence that we need from these cameras, or we are going to dissuade acts of violence. -Shane, APD Officers in Delta also reported the use of overt surveillance cameras. When asked about whether there were challenges in installing cameras, officers expressed satisfaction with the internal management response in addressing their needs indicating: It’s easy, said and done. Yes, it’s easy for us, I don't think we have that much bureaucracy and as much red tape as some agencies do. Like I say, we’re pretty aggressive here sometimes, we have great backing by the chief, and the previous chief…They see it, they’re onto it. -Evan, DPD 48 https://www.surrey.ca/community/20957.aspx 202 In the interest of protecting investigative techniques, I only address overt surveillance methods accompanied by appropriate signage signaling to the community that the area is actively being surveilled (see Figure 16 below). The police officers interviewed were generally in favor of the use of overt surveillance cameras, despite ongoing incidents of gang violence in the neighborhoods under surveillance. It is also possible that a corollary effect of the cameras and accompanying signage was the symbolic signaling to the community of police efforts to improve public safety. This was perceived to be the case by some police officers, who thought they served a dual purpose: Overt public safety cameras – 9 or 10 of them all over the city. From the politics perspective, they are able to say “we have cameras” in high crime areas, from my perspective it helps us to catch them… when the shootings were happening, we moved those cameras into the Townline Hill area and the public perceptions and response was quite positive. -Nate, APD Figure 16. APD Warning Indicating Presence of Surveillance Cameras. Author’s Own Image. 203 Whether the cameras actually make citizens safer from gang violence has yet to be empirically proven, but if citizens feel safer because of the presence of cameras, as reported by the police in this research, this serves as a net positive effect in the community. Figure 17. Abbotsford Police Department’s Anti-Gang Campaign. Reprinted with Express Permission. Anti-Gang Media Campaigns As noted in earlier interviews, the Abbotsford Police Department was the first in the Lower Mainland to produce and distribute explicitly anti-gang messaging. Interviews with police reveal that these campaigns were created in-house by police officers and supported by then Chief Bob Rich for broad distribution throughout the Abbotsford community (see Figure 17). These anti-gang prevention messages have been broadly taken up by the CFSEU-BC through their End Gang Life (EGL) program. Though the CFSEU-BC is not a specific focus of 204 this research, it is important to acknowledge the backdrop and context in which this research was conducted. The EGL program in British Columbia has produced fourteen public service announcement videos, fifteen public service announcement posters, one parent resource guide available in seven languages, and three radio advertisements (Cohen, McCormick, & Osterberg, 2019). A sample of the CFSEU-BC EGL posters are included below with permission. 205 Figure 18. The CFSEU BC’s End Gang Life Posters. Reprinted with express permission. 206 End Gang Life Stickers are on nearly every police vehicle in the province. The proliferation of this program is laudable (Osterberg, McCormick and Cohen, 2019). Figure 19. The CFSEU-BC’s End Gang Life Sticker on a Police Vehicle. Author’s Own Image. Our understanding of the efficacy of anti-gang advertising campaigns is limited. Police produced anti-gang advertisements focused specifically on suppliers of illicit narcotics. Evaluations of these programs are often scarce, but at the time of writing this thesis, an evaluation of some of CFSEU’s EGL programming was underway. When completed, the findings will be an important contribution to the literature on prevention programming and particularly useful given its local production and attention to non-traditional risk factors. Table 12. Prevention Strategies by Jurisdiction. Author’s Own. At this point, there is little evidence that the many police-based gang prevention activities are having any positive effect in reducing gang violence in the Lower Mainland. That said, prevention programs are important because in policing, community perception matters (Hu & Lovrich, 2019). Citizen satisfaction with the police of jurisdiction has important consequences for local policing organizations and public approval of police organizations is an essential Prevention Strategy Surrey Delta Abbotsford Community Forums    Anti-Gang Advertising  Surveillance Cameras    School Talks    School Liaison Officers    207 component of the state’s claim to the legitimate exercise of coercive power. Jesilow, Meyer, and Namazzi (1995) in their study of public perceptions of the police concluded that the primary indicator of attitudes toward the police is how people feel about where they live. If they see problems that the police might do something about, they have negative things to say about the police. They went on to say that these negative perceptions of the police existed despite the police not actually being able to do something about the problem. Given this, prevention programs are visible to the community and a clear signal that the police are seen doing something to address the concern of gang violence and youth membership in gangs (Jesilow et al, 1995). The positive political optics offered by police prevention programs in the community should not be dismissed, particularly given the resource reporting requirements to police boards that are a necessary construct of most local police organizations (Hu & Lovrich, 2019). This aside, it is imperative that moving forward there be a focus on evaluation of these programs to ensure both that there are not any unintended consequences, such as iatrogenic effects, to acquire data supporting the return on investment to assure the continued funding of police prevention programming, and, most importantly evaluation efforts are necessary to figure out what actually works. This concern related to the need for extensive and rigorous evaluations presents itself repeatedly throughout the findings of this research project. Policing Gangs through Secondary Intervention Programs An important caveat in understanding gang intervention strategies is that they tend to focus specifically on at-risk individuals, the gang itself is rarely the target of the intervention (Decker & Pyrooz, 2014). In the Lower Mainland, numerous intervention strategies have been devised and implemented by police organizations. All three policing organizations reported significant involvement in sports programming for at-risk youth. Other intervention programs include the youth liaison officers and a dedicated youth counsellor in Delta, and in Surrey and Abbotsford: wraparound programs targeting individuals at high-risk for gang involvement, or already gang involved youth in an effort to assist them in desistance and exiting from gang life. These programs operate by developing individualized service plans focused on the individual’s specific risk factors (Suter & Bruns, 2009). Beyond this, the Abbotsford Police Department executed a five-year Christmas card campaign, targeting individuals who were known to police 208 as being at-risk for criminal and gang-related activities. Each of these efforts will be examined below. Double Duty: Police Officers as Youth Workers Of the three communities, only Delta had a dedicated youth liaison officer (YLO) position focused on intervention with youth at risk for gang activity and those with mental health concerns. The YLO’s focus was on addressing the underlying issues that contributed to problems at home, school, or in the community, including mental health, anxiety, and addiction by working to identify the root causes and to establish and build prosocial connections to family, stakeholders in the community, and with the police. The DPD’s YLO position was well regarded across the department as producing significant positive results for at-risk youth included on the caseload. In interviewing the Youth Liaison Officers, it became apparent that much of the role involved connecting youth with difficult-to-navigate resources, but a surprising component was the pseudo-parenting role required. The YLO indicated that many of the parents of at-risk youth did not seem to have the requisite skills to provide parental supervision or monitoring, or to provide meaningful consequences for deviant behavior, such as truancy, not coming home at night, substance use and abuse, and criminal behavior. The YLO indicated that, in many cases, their role was to step in and provide the necessary consequences to deter deviant behavior: I have a system, I charge them with something… and they go before the judge, get them on a curfew, and then I breach the shit out of them…there are some meaningful consequences. I tell them, if you’re going out on probation, these are your conditions, I’m going to be enforcing these. If you go out (past curfew), your parents have my phone number, they’re going to call me. I’m going to be sending patrol and if you are not home, guess what – I will come and get you the next day, and you’ll be going to jail, and you can talk to the judge about it. And I keep doing this over and over. Other than two kids, I’ve broken every single one of them; they always get tired of it. Always, unless there are significant mental health or addictions, everyone gets tired of it. -Gene, DPD It was not just the YLO that perceived their role as providing pseudo-parenting and ensuring consequences. In one notable case, reporting to the police youth liaison officer actually became a condition of the court order: I just had the weirdest court order come through; I’ve never seen it before. She (the young person) got sentenced to probation, and it says within 30 days of release, you and your youth worker must organize a face to face meeting with – and then it named me. It said she had to meet with ME, a police officer, within 30 days, and for every 30 days thereafter, until the end of her probation. I became a condition, meeting with me was a condition of probation. The youth worker. P.O. was like ‘I have never seen this before, like can you do this?’ That kid texted me on Sunday, said ‘hey, 209 my PO told me about my condition of meeting with you’. I replied, ‘Yeah it’s a little bit weird’, and she’s like ‘my lawyer told me they couldn’t even do that’. I said, ‘I know, I’m fine with it if you are’, and she said, ‘for sure’. You build these connections and you want to help these kids…and these families. – Gene, DPD The youth liaison officer’s role within the DPD was the result of socio-political conditions in which mayor and council, as well as school board management, saw a need related to youth and supported the Delta Police in addressing the need. Officers reported that this was possible in part because of the size and nimble nature of the department, but also because local political actors were quite influential in ensuring that funding was made available. This was certainly the case when the YLO was paired with a fully funded youth trauma counsellor. Youth Counselling In the summer of 2015, the Corporation of Delta began funding a youth family counsellor assigned to work closely with the YLO to provide counselling services to at-risk youth and their families. Issues typically addressed in counselling included anger, depression, anxiety, aggressive behaviour, low self-perception, abuse in the home, trauma, and bullying. Files referred to the family counsellor generally received more than 100 hours of direct intense counselling services, as well as additional time for case conceptualizations, clinical supervision, and correspondence (Cohen & Osterberg, 2018). It was noted that, after the initial intake interview, most clients were seen on a weekly basis for, on average, 1½ to 2 hours. As an example, if there were four members in the family needing the service, this could result in the youth family counselor devoting eight hours per week to just one file. Though the dedicated and funded position was a valuable resource for a number of years, there had not been new referrals for quite some time due to a full caseload (Cohen & Osterberg, 2018). The police officers aware of and involved in referrals to the counsellor were overwhelmingly impressed both with the City of Delta for providing the resources, but also with the positive results that they perceived for the at-risk youth and their families identified for counselling treatment. The youth counsellor was described as fulfilling a previously unmet need in the community with officers describing long waitlists for counselling assistance with mental health concerns: If you look at child and youth mental health, when I first started, the wait list (for help) was a year. You’re walking in as a parent saying, ‘my kid tried to kill himself three times’ and the doctor says 210 ‘Okay, here’s your intake, and we’ll call you in a year’. If that kid doesn’t show up to three appointments, they’re at the back of the bus – the end of the line again. It’s crazy, honestly, I feel for them. That’s why I was so happy to have the family counseling program because I myself could triage and say, ‘this family needs help now’ and within 24 hours there would be help. -Gene, DPD When asked how the success of this program was measured, the most common response was comparing the number of police contacts prior to program participation with the number of negative police contacts afterwards. At no time during the interviews was the Multisystemic Therapy (MST) program model mentioned, but it would seem that the program being offered in Delta conformed, at least moderately, to this program delivery model. The MST model is one of the therapeutic interventions in which high-risk youth and their families are assigned a therapist (Henggeler, Schoenwald, Bourduin, Rowland, & Cunningham, 2009). In the traditional MST model, the assigned therapist would also work to connect the young person to other resources and supports in their community depending on their unique needs. Though the youth liaison officers in Delta did not describe their combined intervention as a model of MST, consideration of the potential for MST interventions with gang-involved youth should be given serious thought, particularly given that Multisystemic Therapy is considered ‘best practice’ for interventions related to general aggression and behavioral or conduct disorders (Boxer, Docherty, Ostermann, Kubik, & Veysey, 2017; Henggeler et al., 2009). Recent research suggested that there might be ‘sleeper’ effects suggesting that MST might be helpful for gang-involved youth, when examined over a longer period beyond treatment termination (Boxer et al., 2017). It is important to note that officers in Delta described these efforts as a ‘mini-wrap’ program. The model implemented in Delta appears in form and function to fall under the rubric of MST, but it is possible that this description as ‘wrap-lite’ is the result of local knowledge about the WRAP program offered by the Surrey RCMP. In Delta, it would seem that the youth counsellor provided the mental health support and the DPD’s youth liaison officer was responsible for facilitating those community connections with other resources. 211 Sports Programs All of the police organizations interviewed for this study were, in some way, involved in sports activities with at-risk youth in the community. There exists a broad spectrum of activities, including one-time events, such as the Jujitsu day sponsored by the Delta Police Department: MMA was so big, so we put on Jujitsu for teens; it doesn’t cost anything. Basically, in jeans and t-shirt, we teach them jujitsu, we teach them martial arts, and kids love it. We actually have some pretty skilled guys here in our department. Our department has the mats up in north Delta, and it offers a place for these kids to go. It’s not ‘I want to talk gangs’, I don’t want that; I want to teach them skills, some self-confidence, and a positive place to go somewhere cool, and have a positive interaction with a police officer. -Gene, DPD In all of the jurisdictions, officers reported that their school liaisons regularly participated in after-school sport programs with at risk youth. Cherish in Abbotsford reasoned that one of the concerns is the lack of metrics, with officers unable to provide data as to the success of these programs: They’re always bringing kids for basketball games asking, ‘hey you wanna play the police?’, and there are soccer games in the gym. I think that’s important, but that sort of response, that would be pretty difficult to measure…success there, because…that would be a long-term study that no one gets the funding for, or want to dedicate 10 years or longer to doing. -Cherish, DPD Beyond one day events, police reported participating in weekly drop-in programs, week-long summer camps, and intense weekly programs. Broadly stated, all three organizations saw the value in engaging with youth through sport and believed that such participation contributed to breaking down barriers between at-risk youth and the police, contributed to positive perceptions of police in the community, and provided opportunities for positive pro-social mentorship: ‘Code Blue’ is officers in eight high schools, doing after school programs with at risk youth who have nowhere to go so they go and play sports with them, it’s a great initiative. -Ian, Surrey RCMP Frederic with DPD noted that there are corollary long-term benefits to these sports programs insofar as relationship building between young people and the police: We dragged everybody (teachers and principals) out to watch a soccer game between two groups in a school where a police officer coached one team and a police officer coached the other team…everybody would say ‘Jeez I have better things to do’. But you know what? Half those kids are worth it. Even if you get one of them to join the police, and two that don’t think you’re too bad, and three that you could influence. It’s worth it, you don’t know. -Frederic, DPD 212 Like most police intervention initiatives, these programs have never been evaluated. Wraparound Two projects have been funded in British Columbia through the National Crime Prevention funding. These programs are the Surrey WRAP program and the Abbotsford Youth Crime Prevention Program, informally knows as the ‘In It Together’ program. Both of these projects involve multi-agency team-based collaborations across key partners, including youth, their parents, community members, the city, mental health professionals, schools, and the police who all meet regularly to assist an identified at-risk youth (Dub, 2018). Because the wraparound model is designed to address an individual’s unique risk factors, it is difficult to identify a control group to determine the effectiveness of the program (Dub, 2018). Of note, Public Safety Canada is currently funding eleven49 wraparound style programs related to a wide variety of youth deviance across Canada, including the Surrey Wrap and the Abbotsford ‘In it Together’ programs. Surrey WRAP In 2007, the community of Surrey was experiencing increasing levels of gang violence. The wraparound Program emerged in April of 2008 with $808,000 in funding from Public Safety Canada as a partnership between the City of Surrey, the Surrey School Board, and the Surrey RCMP (Dub, 2018). The program’s mandate was to deliver a wraparound ‘philosophy of care’ with the client at the centre of care planning offering participants input throughout the process. The program was focused on youth who were either involved or most at risk of becoming involved in gang activity. Referral to the Surrey Wraparound program was based on the five developmental domains of risk discussed in Chapter Two. Individual risk factors identified by the WRAP program included a history of drug trafficking and/or prior delinquency, desire for status, concerns regarding identity, and low self-esteem (Public Safety Canada, 2012). At the family level, the presence of another gang member in the family, single parent homes, and identified family dysfunction were considered to increase risk. Interacting with anti-social peers was considered highest risk when there was a strong level of commitment identified. Poor school 49 https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/2017-18-rprt-vltn-ncps/index-en.aspx 213 performance, low attendance, and anti-social behavior on campus were also considered indicators of risk (Public Safety Canada, 2012). The wrap program considers whether there are gangs present in the community and whether cultural norms reinforce their presence. Beyond the traditional risk factors, the Surrey Wraparound program identified a number of non-traditional gang risk factors, including being the only son in the family or firstborn son, the family owning their own business and working long hours, and the youth’s peer group being mono-ethnic (Public Safety Canada, 2012). These risk factors have yet to be statistically validated. The Surrey WRAP program uses three screening tools, only one of which has been empirically validated; the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory. The other two tools were developed specifically for the program and are known as the Risk Assessment Tool, called the RAT, which catalogues non-traditional risk factors. The final risk assessment tool is known as the Surrey Gang Entrenchment Scale (SGES) that examines social networks to determine whether there are existing affiliations with known or suspected gang members, as well as those individuals associated with local gangs (Public Safety Canada, 2012). Though no one that works specifically in WRAP was interviewed for this project, police officers from across the three jurisdictions seemed well versed in the program. Many lauded the efforts of the WRAP program noting that the capacity to identify youth that were becoming involved with gangs and then intervene before it was too late is really productive. Kevin from the Surrey RCMP said, When we have a better awareness with more people engaged…teachers and people in schools, people that are youth workers that can understand…those indicators. When they see these youth who are high risk, and we can get them into WRAP programs, we can get them engaged with other support areas. Try to get to them before they become so far in that they can’t stop. -Kevin, Surrey RCMP The Surrey WRAP was evaluated in 2012, but only the evaluation summary document is available for public review. The evaluation appears to be methodologically weak and makes claims that seem questionable, such as ‘The interview data showed that the Surrey Wrap team successfully stopped gang formation on at least one occasion’ (Public Safety Canada, 2012, p.5). No further information to support this claim was provided. This is not to suggest that the Surrey WRAP is not an important program doing meaningful work for at-risk youth in the community. Instead, this critique is simply pointing out that the only evaluation summary of the program 214 after eleven years of existence is unlikely to withstand scrutiny. Not all of the officers interviewed had positive things to say, noting that rational choice is still at play: It doesn’t work if he doesn’t want help. In my mind, if he wants to be the next big drug dealer in town, it doesn’t matter how many services you throw at that kid. Until something clicks in his head and goes, ‘I need to change’, or his buddy gets killed, or somebody shoots at him, or he gets busted for something, until they make that position in their mind they are going to change, we can throw millions of dollars (at them) and it is not going to do anything. -Thomas, Surrey RCMP The funding for the Surrey WRAP program has been renewed through to 2020 with the Board of Education of School District #36 as the primary funding recipient, and, according to Public Safety Canada (2018b), process and outcome evaluations are ongoing. Abbotsford Wraparound Programming In Abbotsford, the ‘In it Together’ program started in April 2009 and was funded by Public Safety Canada as the Abbotsford Youth Crime Prevention Project. The funding for that project was awarded to Archway Community Services and the project ran until 2014 (Public Safety Canada, 2011). Though the formal name is ‘In it Together’, many of the police officers interviewed in the study called the program ‘SACRO’ referring to the South Asian Community Resource Office which collaborated with Archway Community Services on the initiative. Elena with APD was aware of, and supported this initiative, noting its utility for the younger gang-involved individuals: A lot of the mid-level guys like 16,17,18 are…in those schools. We are aware of them, and working with them through our SACRO program to try and get them out. SACRO (workers) gain a lot more intelligence than we do because they deal with all these bad guys. -Elena, APD The partnership between APD and SACRO was seen as being very solid, with a shared goal, and great communication: The people with SACRO were just amazing. Because of our partnership, they would do a lot of the work in terms of advertising, in terms of promoting, and we would come in and be the keynote speaker. Which worked out very well because we did not have the time and resources to do all that. Fortunately, they did with a lot of youth volunteers and what not. So, because we were operating that way, with SACRO, we were getting a lot of success. -Jody, APD In 2013, the Abbotsford Comprehensive Community Action for Gang Reduction Project was funded to 2018. This program is known as the In It Together (IIT) program and was founded on the Spergel model. A recently completed program evaluation suggested that the program had 215 positive outcomes as more than one-third of participants exhibited a decline in total risk scores at follow-up. Program participants missed fewer days of school and analysis of police data found that although still engaged in anti-social behavior, program participants were involved in behaviors that could be considered less serious than upon entry. Problematically however, the results of this program evaluation are not available through public sources, thereby reinforcing the dearth of research available in Canada, as even when programs have been evaluated, the results are not readily available to police and NGO’s looking to implement similar programs elsewhere. Desistance & Exiting None of the police officers interviewed for this research indicated they had participated in assisting a gang-involved individual in exiting gang life. Several spoke of it theoretically, suggesting that it is a possibility, but would come with experience issues: We can use the witness protection program. I’m sure that that service could be extended to the gang community as well for someone who may need witness relocation or whatnot. At times I think the biggest barrier is that we say we can do these things -but how do we do it? How do we make it happen actually, in real life? Not on paper. -Patricia, DPD At the APD, River was less optimistic about the capacity of police organizations to provide assistance to individuals seeking to exit gang life because of resourcing issues: When the guy says, ‘I am going to get killed I need you guys to relocate me’, what are we going to do? Nobody had the answer… What would I have said then? So, we try to hook them up with the Federal Witness Protection Plan?…From my experience almost nobody qualifies for that…I think it is a little bit of a smoke show. -River, APD The CFSEU-BC has a gang exiting and intervention program, but none of the officers I interviewed made reference to it. Christmas Cards In 2012, the Abbotsford Police Department developed a new strategy of mailing Christmas cards to 60 known offenders in the Abbotsford community. The cards depicted Chief Bob Rich dressed up as Santa holding a machine gun (See Figure 20 below). The result was perhaps unexpected with the community of Abbotsford making international headlines, including the UK Daily Mail, the Huffington Post, and a mention on the popular New York based daytime television show Live with Kelly and Michael (Hurst, 2012). Not all of the attention was positive 216 as some members of the public questioned the use of the image of Santa in riot gear. Through all of the media attention, Abbotsford Mayor Bruce Banman stood by the initiative stating that he believed it was an important effort. Of the Abbotsford police officers interviewed for this thesis, seven spoke directly about the Christmas card campaign50. Of those interviews, four spoke of the program in enormously positive terms suggesting that it ‘put Abbotsford on the map’ and indicating that it was nice to see Abbotsford in the media without the moniker ‘murder capital’: It was ‘let’s try anything and everything’…you send out a Christmas card and you are only sending it to about 100 people. I think in year one it was like 65 (cards), and then we added another 10 (cards), but you are sending them to a very limited audience. We knew that the media attention would be exponentially greater than…the single impact of somebody opening their (Christmas) card. So that was all intentional. It was not to turn it into a circus; it was not to make the Chief famous across the globe. One of the unintended consequences was that, and it did that, which didn’t hurt us from the standpoint of message or brand, so those are wins. -Shane, APD It was quite the initiative when it first came out, pretty interesting. It got a lot of dialogue from the public, and from everywhere else. -Garrett, APD Through our Christmas card program, I have spoken to people who are making bad choices. -Tyson, APD 50 Express permission for the use of all APD images was obtained via email communication from former APD Chief Bob Rich. 217 Figure 20. Abbotsford Police Department’s 2012 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. Of the other three interviewees who spoke of the program, two were somewhat dismissive, and one suggested it was nothing more than a media stunt. Despite this, the officers who viewed the program positively suggested that it was meeting its intentions. Dylan noted: It depends on what you call success right? So, if one person changes their life and gets out of that…lifestyle is that success… it is for that person, right? Maybe you send it to a thousand people and only one responds. That might be considered a failure, but it depends on how you look at that. -Dylan, APD The following year, Chief Bob Rich’s Christmas card said ‘Even Santa makes mistakes’ depicting Santa writing out ‘I will not play with guns’ on a chalkboard (See Figure 21 below). The Christmas Card became an annual tradition complete with media releases that targeted a different demographic each year. 218 Figure 21. Abbotsford Police Department's 2013 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. 219 The 2014 version of the APD Christmas card (see Figure 22) was mailed to more than 75 young people in Abbotsford, many of whom were involved in petty crimes, such as vandalism and mischief, but who the police believed were at-risk for gang involvement (Hopes, 2014). Figure 22. Abbotsford Police Department's 2014 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. In the 2015 campaign, Abbotsford Police mailed out 108 Christmas cards (Figure 23 below) focusing on problem and prolific property offenders, as well as those involved in the Townline Hill gang conflict that, as noted previously, involved two groups of young South Asian men that had developed into a violent battle for drug turf (Hopes, 2015). 220 Figure 23. Abbotsford Police Department’s 2015 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. The 2016 Christmas Card offered the most text of any annual iteration, and the visual image was in no way controversial and was definitely the outlier, garnering very little public or media attention (see Figure 23 below). The officers interviewed at the Abbotsford Police Department recalled that the recipients of their 2016 Christmas Card list included known gang members, drug dealers, and property offenders. Over the years, several Christmas card recipients reached out to APD: I probably talked to four or five people as a result of the Christmas card program, and tried to offer them help. But, the thing is that they have to actually really want it. There is no magic wand to 221 wave, so they have got to be really committed. A few of them that I have met with, I tried to set them up with programs and they kind of just, relapsed. -Tyson, APD Figure 24. Abbotsford Police Department’s 2016 Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. On November 6th, 2017, Constable John Davidson of the Abbotsford Police Department was tragically murdered while on duty. The 2017 APD Christmas card offered a somber message thanking the community for their support in the days and weeks that followed Constable Davidson’s death. In the months that followed APD’s Chief Constable Bob Rich retired. This message of thanks to the community was the last of the Christmas cards distributed by APD: 222 Figure 25. Abbotsford Police Department's 2017 & Final Christmas Card. Author’s Own Image. R.I.P Constable John Davidson 539 | 386 We Remember 223 Several APD members noted that the department received calls from recipients of the Christmas cards indicating that they hoped to change their behavior. The officers I interviewed indicated that they did not believe that any data was kept to determine whether the Christmas cards actually resulted in some gang members or those at risk for gang membership changing their lives. The lack of evaluation aside, the annual Christmas cards were consistently a media spectacle almost annually making the front page of local community focused newspapers. Hu and Lovrich (2019) argued that police agencies are deeply embedded in the communities they serve, so they must demonstrate the ability to respond to both internal and external/environmental factors to maintain their existence. Innovative strategies, such as the development of APD’s Christmas cards, could be seen as the product of the resource dependency theory of police organizations that suggested that police organizations were ever in need of building and enhancing their legitimacy because they depended heavily upon their local government for resources. Given this, such external pressures for innovation were nearly always carefully assessed and acted upon as resources could be in short supply or abundant at any one point in time (Hu & Lovrich, 2019). The continued public support offered by Abbotsford’s Mayor throughout the years suggests that the Christmas card campaign offered an effective demonstration of innovation, and signalled to the community that the Abbotsford Police Department was actively engaged in managing community concerns. Intervention Strategy Surrey Delta Abbotsford Youth Liaison Officer  Youth Counsellor  Youth Sports Programs    Wraparound Program   Table 13. Intervention Strategies by Jurisdiction. Author’s Own. Prevention is as a necessary component of police policy efforts to respond to gang violence, as it serves a function in community engagement and ensures that the police are seen to be doing something positive. Given the lack of rigorous evaluation and replication studies, there are very few gang-related programs that have proven to be effective at achieving their objectives. That said, the net positive effect of these efforts has been broad public engagement. In their 224 research, Hu and Lovrich (2019) argued that in order to maintain required funding and resources, police agencies must demonstrate the ability to respond to both internal and external/environmental factors, they must be doing something and there is intrinsic value in the public’s perceptions of police. The next section will provide an overview of the traditional suppression programs, including uniformed gang enforcement and curfew checks, as well as highlight government and police efforts to mobilize administrative legislation, moving beyond the traditional criminal justice system. Policing Gangs through Tertiary Suppression Strategies Significant police presence combined with swift and forcible response of the criminal justice system provide the bases for tertiary suppression strategies, and generally operate through the creation of special police units focused on gang enforcement in specific geographical areas (Wood, Alleyne & Beresford, 2016). In the literature, these strategies have often been called Gang Activity Regulation, and typically include the development of specialized law enforcement units focusing strategic enforcement measures on gang related activity, units that have existed throughout North America for more than twenty years (Katz & Webb, Ransford et al., 2010). The focus of these specialized units includes overt and covert surveillance, street checks (widely debated in the literature), the creation and maintenance of databases (also noted as problematic)51, curfew checks, and directed patrols (Katz & Webb, 2006). Despite the fact that the Integrated Gang Task Force (IGTF) was formed more than fifteen years ago, and several policing organizations have since developed specialized units (Vancouver, Surrey RCMP, and Abbotsford), gangs in the Lower Mainland continue to flourish (Bouchard & Hashimi, 2017; McConnell, 2015). That said, though suppression strategies locally have yet to undergo rigorous evaluation, there are suggestions in the literature that police suppression strategies have resulted in progress elsewhere. In their narrative synthesis of 38 rigorous gang prevention/intervention strategy evaluations, Wong et al. (2012) noted that programs focusing on offering alternatives to 51 For fulsome discussion of the problematic over inclusion of minorities in US gang intelligence databases, see the important work of Aba-Onu, Levy-Pounds, Salmen, & Tyner (2010). 225 gang activity were not found to be effective, and that the category of targeted gang activity suppression programs was the only one of the approaches demonstrating consistent positive outcomes. The Dallas Anti-Gang Initiative focused on aggressive curfew enforcement and police tactics that emphasized enforcement, resulting in lower rates of gang violence (Fritsch, Caeti, & Taylor, 1999). The following sections will offer police perceptions of the suppression strategies deployed by police in BC’s Lower Mainland. Uniformed Gang Enforcement The first large scale uniformed gang team in British Columbia was established as the IGTF (Integrated Gang Task Force) in 2005 in response to consultation with South Asian community leaders who noted that many South Asian gangs included individuals from wealthy, educated families (RCMP, 2006). According to the RCMP Environmental Scan (2006), the IGTF was initially assigned 60 full-time police officers and 13 civilian staff. The mandate of the IGTF was to ‘identify, investigate, and prosecute gangs involved in chronic, violent criminal activity, such as homicides, extortions, drive-by shootings, and kidnappings’ (RCMP Gazette, 2008). Matt in Abbotsford spoke highly of his time working with IGTF and the progress that was made in opening the doors for the community to work with police in interrupting criminal behavior: I think when the IGTF came about…there were rumors, there were innuendos, people (in the community) suspected…who was involved and how they were involved (in gangs), but no one was willing to come forward. Either because they were profiting themselves, or they had some sort of familial tie, or somehow there was an aspiration to be like that person. So that was really the biggest hurdle, was to convince people first… Once those successes, even minor successes like three kilos of coke here, a couple of guns here, once those started hitting the public airways then yes, we slowly started to see the door open. People came in and were like ‘you know I suspected my neighbor, he does not work, has four cars, a $500,000 home, and more jewelry than I have seen’. So, now you had people like that starting to come forward. -Matt, APD In 2009, CFSEU-BC was established and included the Organized Crime Agency of British Columbia (OCABC), and the BC Integrated Gang Task Force. Within the CFSEU-BC, there are several covert surveillance teams and the very visible Uniformed Gang Enforcement Team (UGET) formerly known as IGTF. All of the police organizations interviewed for this project contributed manpower and resources to the CFSEU-BC, while both Surrey RCMP and the Abbotsford Police Department also have their own Uniformed Gang Enforcement Teams. 226 When asked about the recruiting process for selecting members of the Uniformed Gang Enforcement Teams Mark in Surrey suggested that overt masculinity is an important component of gang enforcement: I think traditionally, at least the way we have selected people to join the gangs team, you’re looking generally for a certain type of person, generally from the members you’re picking you tend to go for, tend to be filled with the more aggressive, more in your face, more enforcement kind of members. That’s been traditionally been the role. -Mark, Surrey RCMP Mark recognized that the role of gang enforcement was inherently different from that of general duty policing with an important function being the signal to gang-involved individuals that the police were aware of their membership and activities, and were present: I would suggest that a lot of our goal is a lot of flying the flag, like ‘look we’re here and watching you’ kind of thing. -Mark, Surrey RCMP In Abbotsford, there has not always been a gang enforcement team. The presence of a team was determined by operational need and was created and then disbanded based on the levels of active gang violence in the community: We have created a gang suppression unit during peak times of violence…to go and address gang conflict, and gang violence, and be overtly present. -Garrett, APD When asked about the successes observed working on the gang team, Flynn from APD was quick to remember the overt gang suppression activities during the Abbotsford conflict of 2008/2009: I think the most successful thing I've seen is the overt presence around the Bacons. Like, that worked better than anybody could have imagined. I mean, again, that's like a hundred-year-old police tactic. I hate using the words but, I don't know if it's politically correct or not, but there are some people say it sounds harsh, but it saturated and dominated these goons. They have no fear of the criminal justice system, but if you are standing all over the top of them… Every time they would get in a car to drive somewhere like it... it severely impacts their life. -Flynn, APD Aiden (APD) spoke of the overt surveillance tactics used with the Bacon Brothers as being particularly successful in ensuring safety in public places: When the Bacons would go to the gym, the uniformed officers would go to the gym with them, and they'd say ‘hey, this guy’s a gangster, he's got some threats on his life, it's probably not in your best interest to have him here’. -Aiden, APD 227 This overt surveillance was perceived to be effective at eliminating the glamor of the gangster lifestyle with officers indicating that it was nearly impossible for gang members to talk to women when they were being escorted around by uniformed police. Though overt surveillance has not been mobilized as a strategy in recent times, Oakley with Abbotsford’s gang enforcement team suggested it is an important means to ensure that gang members knew they were a focus of police attention: As long as we have a good reason to believe that you were involved in violent gang conflict, we will make this place a terrible place to live for you. -Oakley, APD Elena, who is involved in overt gang enforcement activities spoke of ensuring public safety as the primary objective of their enforcement activities: We are actively checking these guys. We are stopping vehicles because we know a lot of these guys…they may have guns and the drugs. Our number one priority is public safety which means that we have to be on top of these guys…a lot of these guys have curfews; we make sure they are abiding by their curfews. If not, we are going to charge them. We are going to be checking them in vehicles, we are going to be checking their associations. So, making sure when we stop the vehicle, we know ‘that guy is a bad guy and he is with this guy, this guy we don't know’ then we find out who these two guys are…and how are they affiliated. -Elena, APD The importance of the uniformed gang team as an intelligence gathering unit was noted by Matt (APD) who said that they often had weekly interactions with the individuals that were subjects of police concern: I know what you are up to, and regardless of where you go, whether it is to socialize, whether it is to go out and have a couple of drinks, whether you are out with your girlfriend, or even your mother, chances are that you are going to meet one of our people. And, if you are in a situation where I have the authority to remove you, I will remove you. I will know what you are driving today, I know what you are driving next week, so there is really no hiding from the uniformed [gang enforcement] team. -Matt, APD These interviews were conducted in 2017, Abbotsford has since reinvigorated its gang suppression team with a dedicated team of four officers (Hopes, 2018). The Outlier: Delta’s Unique ‘No Call Too Small’ Philosophy: As I stated earlier, this thesis is not a comparative examination of police responses across the municipalities. That said, Delta Police Department’s ‘No Call Too Small’ philosophy has some important implications for the ways in which they approach issues in that community. The Delta Police Department was the outlier as they were the only organization that did not have a 228 dedicated uniformed gang enforcement team. Though most respondents mentioned the three-pronged approach of prevention, intervention, and enforcement or suppression, the interviews in Delta were generally dominated by discourse around Delta’s departmental philosophy of ‘no call too small’, which was mentioned by every respondent in every interview. Described as a community centred strategy, the ‘no call too small’ philosophy was often portrayed as being a very successful tool: The people that reside in our community know that we’re going to respond when they make a complaint. Whether that’s a suspicious person, or theft from auto, a theft of auto…. where bigger places with less resources aren’t able to do that, they don’t have the ability. I’m sure if everybody could respond to everything, I’m sure everyone would. So, what it means is, you know, when someone who’s got tattoos and it’s a big guy who doesn’t work during the day or…. ever… and he’s got his buddies who drive fancy cars, but also don’t seem to have a job. You know we’re going to get that phone call, and were going to look into it, you know? And then if we know they're here, we’re visiting them, they’re seeing us all the time, it’s kind of like ‘we know you’re here’ and there’s no secret to that - we’re right in your face, we know you’re here, don’t conduct your business in Delta, because we have our eyes on you. -Amanda, DPD Across the spectrum of interviews, it was apparent that, as a founding principle, police officers in Delta were encouraged to actively engage when becoming aware of unusual or suspicious circumstances. This was described as possible because the call loads were perceived by DPD officers to be lower than in other cities, so officers had more time to conduct proactive work in the community. Interestingly, it became apparent that the ‘no call too small’ philosophy was both a preventative measure and, to some degree, a suppression tactic with several officers noting that a gang enforcement team was not necessary in Delta because every patrol officer did gang suppression. For example, Evan reported that when time is available, officers in Delta engage the ‘no call to small’ philosophy: If we identify somebody (gang) associated in Delta, we’re banging on the door, we’re copping those guys, and we’re letting them know we’re watching them. I’m not saying we’re stalking them or doing anything illegal; we are operating both in the confines of the criminal code, but we are ensuring we are doing our job. As Delta says, ‘there's no call too small’ and there's nothing that we won’t do to ensure community safety, so……as far as Delta is concerned, we’re maintaining our three-pronged approach and we’re continuing to do that. And, when a hot spot springs up, we’re on it right away. -Evan, DPD Another officer somewhat jokingly inferred that the DPD had a welcome wagon, where police officers would ‘welcome’ new citizens who were known to police or gang affiliated and 229 described knocking on the door of a new Delta resident known to police greeting the person with a smile and saying: We know you’re here, just wanted you to know - that we know you’re living here. So, if you see us, we’re going to wave to you. Our patrol cars are going to sit outside your house and write reports, that kind of stuff. -Carla, DPD The ‘welcome wagon’ philosophy was also deployed when the police in Delta received notification that an incarcerated individual was being released into the community: If someone is being released in the community, and they’re taking up residence in Delta, and there’s a court condition, we are on those guys like glue. We will make a personal visit, we will let them know who we are, and that we know they are on conditions. -Evan, DPD Overwhelmingly, (5 out of 6) respondents indicated that Delta does not have a gang problem. When questioned about the reasons officers perceive this to be the case, officers noted that those involved in gangs did not do their business in Delta: I would probably characterize it is we raise baby gangsters, or baby gangsters come back home to Mommy and Daddy and spend some time here…I think that we have a pretty good reputation in Delta for the ‘no call too small’. And so, when there is activity here, we’re pretty much on top of it, and I think that’s known. So, we don’t necessarily see the big groupings of gangsters or gangs. -Carla, DPD Beyond its perceived utility as a preventative tactic, the ‘no call too small’ philosophy was also mobilized in the community to encourage citizen assistance with ongoing investigations: We were starting to get a few shootings happening, so we went out in uniform in the hot spots, knocking on doors…and saying to the community: ‘Guess what? If you see anything in the community that disturbs you…. I don't care if it’s a cat crossing the road, you call us and ‘no call too small’, we’re coming to that area’ -Frederic, DPD Though Delta has never had a dedicated gang unit, it would seem that the ‘no call too small’ philosophy has resulted in many of the practices deployed by gang units in other cities have been deployed nevertheless. Curfew Checks When asked about the activities of gang suppression units, a core tactic of these Lower Mainland teams reported by 19 of the officers interviewed included the enforcement of curfew checks: 230 The one thing that we do all the time is curfew checks on all these people. So, they are getting arrested, they are getting charged, they’re getting released on conditions, conditions always have... or rather most of the time have these conditions of these curfews. So we are knocking on their doors at two/three in the morning and making sure that they are... we’re babysitting….the one guy I talked to he is playing video games and we'll just chit chat about that, and it may be a little bit of rapport building, but for the most part it is a super negative contact, and they have no interest in chatting with us. They open the door, do what they have to, and close the door. -Aiden, APD In Abbotsford, during a period that there was not a dedicated gang team, Garrett reported that the ERT team would sometimes be deployed to conduct these checks: That is one of the things we do overtly, is we go out and we do curfew checks, compliance checks. We are in contact with probation and parole about gangsters or identified gangsters released into the community. -Garrett, APD When asked about the success of this strategy, both Amanda with DPD and Kelly with APD indicated that curfew checks were a helpful tool to ensure immediate consequences to breaching conditions: Most effective from our standpoint is the strict conditions. Um, that are enforceable not the ones that are the fluff. The curfew, the ‘no contact’ (orders)… either the gang guys, or our members can go out and enforce. -Amanda, DPD If he is past his curfew, the very next morning they would go and follow up with the bail supervisor and get a warrant for the guy. That one-two combination I have never seen anything that has been more effective, and that is a model that we got from CFSEU where they have the uniform team working with the investigators. That combination in my opinion just cannot be beat and if you have the resources for both which very few agencies do then you got a good handle on things. -Kelly, APD Harper in Abbotsford indicated that the curfew check strategy was not being deployed as a tool with enough consistency: Showing up their doorstep, checking on them… sometimes they will have a curfew, sometimes they have other conditions not to be around other people. If we do not do that, they are just going to continue doing whatever they want. -Harper, APD When asked about strategies that had been unsuccessful, Mark in Surrey indicated that too many curfew checks could become a double-edged sword: Most of the time we curfew check, and they’re home…we’ve talked a lot about trying to shift away from just knocking on people’s doors all the time. I think it actually has the opposite effect of what we’re looking for. Because when they do end up in front of the judge, and the guy has breached, he 231 says ‘well they curfew checked me 30 times this month, I was there 29 times, I fucked up once’…and get a second chance. -Mark, Surrey RCMP One respondent stressed the cost of curfew checks noting that it was important to ensure that the officers who were best equipped and wanted to be doing this type of work were the ones conducting the checks. Officer perceptions of the efficacy of curfew checks were notably mixed, with a spectrum of opinions. Those that strongly supported the use of this strategy as an effective tool noted that it is only effective for those specific individuals placed on probation orders, and does little to address the persistent broader issue of gang violence in British Columbia. Displacement It’s displacement. They are moving out; you know what our problem was is now Burnaby’s problem. -Thomas, Surrey RCMP The interviews with police in all three jurisdictions suggested that displacement was a common result of police suppression activities in the Lower Mainland. Dave with Surrey RCMP reasoned that it was to be expected given the multi-jurisdictional nature of policing in BC. The gang enforcement teams in particular were perceived to be a deterrent to local criminals: Surrey is out with SGET and tactical uniforms disrupting, pushing, it hasn’t solved the problem, it displaced it to another area. Dave, Surrey RCMP If gang enforcement teams were successful in affecting the individual opportunity costs as perceived by gang members, the net result might be that they no longer conducted their business within the jurisdiction resulting in displacement to other Lower Mainland communities. Ivan in Abbotsford indicated having deployed a unique and interesting strategy to promote public safety and deter dial-a-doping in their community. This strategy emerged during the gang violence of 2008/2009 and involved the use of a telephone auto-dialer: Somebody from drug squad came up with the idea ‘why don't we just try to fuck up their (drug) lines’. So, we got the IT guys, and they came up with a program where we had a computer that constantly dialed dial-a-dope numbers. As soon as they were answered, they would hang up. So…while this thing was ongoing, every time we got a new dial-a-dope number that was associated with the Bacons, the number went into the program, and the computer just continually dialed that number until it was out of business. -Ivan, APD According to APD, this strategy has not been deployed in a number of years, but it was an example of a creative and unique policy response developed and implemented at the local level 232 intended to disrupt and displace criminal activity in a given community. Officers reported that this strategy can no longer be deployed because of legal ramifications. Concerns about legal liability were raised in several interviews, with Mark from Surrey RCMP suggesting that liability goes both ways and arguing that the police have an obligation to act, and that, from his perception, failure to act is also likely to result in the department being sued: We need to accept the fact that policing is a liability inducing field. We’re going to get sued, people are going to get hurt because of police trying to stop criminals. And we have to balance that. I think we’ve gone too far to the one side of being like ‘No we don’t want any liability’ but, I think it’s just as liability inducing. -Mark, Surrey RCMP Disruption techniques were lauded by River with APD as an effective tactic in targeted gang intervention strategies: I was a primary on a file that was designed to disrupt. So, what we decided to do was fuck with them in any way that we could. By the time we were done, they could not get a pizza delivered… we would go to the pizza place that they ordered from and say, ‘Look, you are at risk, if you drive it to that house you might get shot’. So, the pizza place would not deliver. Then, they were phoning the taxis to pick up their food. So, we went to the taxis. Then, they could not get food delivered. Next, we went to the rental car companies and we said, ‘if you rent to these guys your car is probably going to get shot up, or as they are returning it you might get shot up’. They stopped renting to them. I think all that helped. -River, APD Barwatch In the Lower Mainland, some jurisdictions, including Abbotsford and Delta, adopted the Barwatch and Restaurant Watch Inadmissible Patron Programs (IPP). The Barwatch program was discussed previously in Chapter Three and is an administrative tool intended to effectively displace those who are gang-involved from local restaurants and bars. Abbotsford and Delta members indicated that they believed the program was being used fulsomely: I would say every night there is some capacity of a Barwatch operation going on [in Abbotsford]. Whether that is a simple check at the local pub, or somebody [a police officer] walking into Cactus for two minutes just to peek their head in there. There is some initiative under Barwatch all the time. It is utilized on an ongoing basis. -Garrett, APD 233 An officer in Surrey who lamented that the program was not being implemented in his jurisdiction indicated that he believed it was an important tool for disrupting the glamorization of the gang lifestyle: They look over and see these guys sitting at the table and they got like Dom Perignon, whatever they’re doing. You know, their bling, and they got girls all around them…and they’re driving around in Escalades. That, in my mind, is more impressionable on the kid’s mind than your talk at the schools. -Nixon, Surrey RCMP Gahunia, McConnell, and Bain (2019) suggested that the restaurant watch initiative was developed and implemented in the City of Vancouver as a policy response to the violence occurring in and around licensed establishments, noting that 86 people were shot or stabbed around restaurants and bars between 1987 and 2014. The effectiveness of the Inadmissible Patron Programs as a displacement strategy was readily acknowledged by Evan in Delta who was attuned to this program and noted that a large casino would soon be opening in their jurisdiction: I think also the restaurant and bar watches is another good strategy as well, that’s really having an impact and effect on these gangs. But you’re really having an effect of displacing it, and then they go somewhere else where they are welcomed, and people don’t care. -Evan, DPD In Delta, the Inadmissible Patrons Program has been touted a success with officers conducting, on average, 20 checks and ejecting two to three parties each month (Delta Optimist, 2019). Also in Delta, Amanda expressed concerns about the gang designation attached to some people: In the intelligence section, we have what you call ‘paper gangsters’. For lack of a better word, there’s lazy cops out there, it’s throughout the Lower Mainland, and it’s not just here, it’s everywhere. They would see on PRIME that this person is gang related, and it might just be that they would check their car is parked 5 blocks away from clubhouse. They tag them associated to a gang [in PRIME], so now gang, gang, gang and they’re always flagged. I take that for what it’s worth, I do my homework before I put that stamp on somebody. -Amanda, DPD For Kelly, the stated goal of the IPP was often displacement with a focus on public safety, and officers suggested that there had never been violence at a licensed establishment in Delta: I like to think that if we put enough pressure on them, they are more dispersed which is for our little area, our little city objective met, as long as they are far enough away. -Kelly, APD Intense and concerted police efforts to increase the likelihood of being caught and subjected to sanctions were a frequent narrative in Delta. As noted previously in this chapter, the philosophy 234 of ‘no call too small’ and the capacity for Delta Police to respond in meaningful ways resulted in community members willing to call the police: The neighbourhoods were phoning us for any little thing, which is really good. We’ve got a two-person car, and two big police officers get out for every little thing, everyone is talked to, spoken to, in high risk areas, a lot of visibility, a lot of media, a lot of action, a lot of enforcement. -Frederic, DPD Another regulatory measure that encouraged displacement was the development and implementation of municipal bylaws intended to deter criminal enterprises. An example of this is the City of Surrey’s Controlled Substance Property Bylaw enacted in 2006 to deter marijuana grow operations from establishing in Surrey. The bylaw focused on public safety mobilizing local government capacity to order an electrical repair, disconnect water, and revoke an occupancy permit. The bylaw required that property owners inspect rental properties at least every three months, report any contraventions, and, if required to do so, ensure remediation of the property within sixty days.52 Kevin in Surrey perceived the relationship with Bylaws to be productive, noting: We do work closely with the bylaws people and have controlled substances bylaw in Surrey that allows us to now flag a property…if it meets a certain criterion with controlled substances bylaw. -Kevin, Surrey RCMP In Surrey, it would seem the relationship between the RCMP and Surrey Bylaws is beneficial. Hitting the Pocketbook - Civil Forfeiture Civil forfeiture, hitting them where it hurts most… has been fantastic. -Amanda, DPD Civil forfeiture legislation was enacted in 2006 in British Columbia. Since that time, more than 4,900 files were created by law enforcement organizations resulting in the forfeiture of more than $73 million dollars in currency and property.53 The BC Government noted that civil forfeiture legislation existed in eight of ten provinces across Canada. Of the jurisdictions included in this study, only one had a dedicated unit focused on civil forfeitures, known as the Asset Section of the Surrey RCMP: Surrey, we’re lucky to have an asset section… Burnaby, Coquitlam, and Langley, they might have one person doing it off the side of their desk type of thing. Surrey, because it’s such a problem. We 52 Surrey’s Controlled Substance Property Bylaw can be found at: https://www.surrey.ca/city-government/7263.aspx 53 https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/crime-prevention/civil-forfeiture-office/facts-figures 235 have about sixty-five vehicles seized as offence related property currently in our compound, and there’s three of us that are doing it (civil forfeiture). -Cherish, Surrey RCMP Given that Surrey RCMP has approximately four times as many police officers as the other two jurisdictions included in this study, it is not surprising that they were the only ones with a dedicated unit focused on civil forfeiture processes. In Delta, civil forfeiture was described as being of value both for its deterrence elements and for the community grants that came from the civil forfeiture office: We use civil forfeiture all the time, you bet…we ensure that we get our bang for our buck, and we also make our applications for grants from civil forfeiture which help us in our process against these individuals that are corrupting our community. -Evan, DPD The BC government has indicated that more than $31 million dollars has been returned to communities across BC through civil forfeiture grants. Civil forfeiture was revered as a useful tool in efforts to combat gangs and drug trafficking. This was particularly cogent when Kevin in Surrey compared the consequences of the court with those of the civil forfeiture process: I’m not trying to be critical of the courts, but the very structure of that is glacial, well for us…the civil forfeiture regime is pretty effective in this province, it’s not well liked as all elements of society. There are civil libertarians that have a sizeable problem with it…. we see it as being able to take away the attractiveness and the allure and the profit that you get from being involved in that [gang life]. -Kevin, Surrey RCMP The narrative of taking away the glamor of gang members was repeated and was viewed as productive in reducing the risk for recruitment: We’ve got lots full of cars and…safes full of money…we take away the illusion of, you know, living in a mansion and having a millionaire’s lifestyle. -Hayden, Surrey RCMP The capacity for police to immediately disrupt the individual benefits of the gang lifestyle was seen as an important and necessary consequence with Cherish in Surrey indicating that civil forfeiture was more punitive and timelier than the courts: I like civil forfeiture because its immediate consequences, and its immediate disruption. Repercussions are targeting that lifestyle, taking their money, taking their cars, taking their houses sometimes; that makes more of an impact on them, it’s more punitive than the courts. -Cherish, Surrey RCMP Officers in Surrey seemed to have the most direct experience with civil forfeiture cases noting that it was a useful strategy in at least slowing the activities of dial-a-dopers in their jurisdiction: 236 I think we’ve had some pretty interesting success with the asset forfeiture stuff mostly because we take people's cars… Many, because they’re less organized, and they’re just these small little cliques you could really disrupt them, because they may only have 2 cars. Now they have to find somebody who is able…and capable of registering a car in their name…on a small scale you could disrupt small operations for a week, two weeks, once you take all their cars. -Mark, Surrey RCMP Mark also noted that a common trend encountered in Surrey was a young person’s use of a parent’s vehicle for dial-a-doping, which could be subjected to forfeiture proceedings: The way civil forfeiture normally works…let’s say your child is arrested drug dealing in your car. But, you have no history…we would notify you and your car would get returned to you, and you’d get warned. But, the second time, sorry you were told about this, and it’s our car now…… -Mark, Surrey RCMP He also indicated that the dial-a-dopers were learning to cheat the system by moving towards the use of ‘nominee owners’. This was a situation where a person who is indebted to the gang was given a vehicle and asked to insure it as their own paying cash up front for basic insurance (no collision): A nominee owner… is super common, if you are known user… they pay you whatever, per day, to use their car, register cars in their names. -Mark, Surrey RCMP Cherish with the Surrey RCMP described situations where homeless and drug addicted users were the nominee owners of vehicles being used for dial-a-dope operations: To be honest, lately the trends of actually having a registered owner under charge are few and far between because everyone is using nominees, and a second thing beyond a nominee is to use rental cars. -Cherish, Surrey RCMP It would seem that as soon as the police figured out a way to prosecute nominee owners, the trend moved towards using rental vehicles for dial-a-doping. Officers in Surrey noted that after the first few vehicles from mainstream rental establishments were found to be used in drug delivery operations, their teams contacted all of the local rental organizations to create awareness that after the first warning, the vehicle could be seized. The mainstream rental organizations became reluctant to rent to gang members. As a result, police reported that there had been several new vehicle rental facilities opened locally that, from their perspective, were entirely illegitimate and had no prosocial business activities. One officer asserted that the rental vehicles of one particular establishment were vehicles that the average person would not be willing to pay a rental fee for, using the example of a 1993 Pontiac Grand Am: 237 Well, they use rentals right. That’s just an operating expense for them right. So, what if the rental gets seized? There’s been dirty rental companies that the Surrey forfeiture team has been successful in shutting down. -Bill, Surrey RCMP Officers acknowledged that there were some potential civil liberties issues related to civil forfeiture and that, as a tool, it ought to be used according to procedure and in accordance with the regulations. One potential unintended consequence of civil forfeiture legislation may be that officers were more motivated or inclined to use the civil forfeiture legislation rather than the traditional criminal justice system. The barriers to successful prosecution were much higher. Officers reported that civil forfeiture was immediate, whereas the court system could take two to three years, and the burden of proof was lower based on the notion of ‘on the balance of probabilities’ rather than the necessary ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ of criminal law. Moreover, civil forfeiture defendants were not eligible for legal aid, unlike in the criminal courts. Amendments to Civil Forfeiture legislation in BC received Royal Assent on May 16, 2019. One notable revision shifted the burden of proof to the defendant to prove that a seized asset was not an instrument or proceed of unlawful activity in cases where there was sufficient evidence clearly linking the asset to the crime (Kane, 2019). The new law states 19.03 In proceedings under Part 2 or 3 or section 14.11, proof that cash or negotiable instruments, with a total value greater than $10 000, were found (a) in proximity to a controlled substance, or (b) in the case of cash, bundled or packaged in a manner not consistent with standard banking practices is proof, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the cash or negotiable instruments are proceeds of unlawful activity. This legislation has important ramifications for police. It might be invoked, for example, where the police encountered a safe full of money and illicit narcotics, where the money would be seized and the presence of the illicit narcotics, at the point of seizure, would be used as evidence to invoke reverse onus. While many civil liberties associations were reasonably upset about the amendments to BC’s civil forfeiture laws, participants suggested that the legislation was being used consistently and in keeping with the requirements of the law. It is likely that the new legislation will be legally challenged, as was the prior legislation, which has been repeatedly upheld by the courts. 238 Suppression Strategy Surrey Delta Abbotsford Gang Enforcement Team  *54 Curfew Checks    Barwatch/Restaurant Watch *55   Displacement    Civil Forfeiture    Table 14. Suppression Strategies by Jurisdiction. Author’s Own. The police are squarely within their wheelhouse of training, skills, and expertise when developing and implementing suppression strategies. The emergence of the Surrey Gang Enforcement Team (SGET) followed by the revival of the APD Gang Enforcement Unit (GEU) were to be expected given the persistent brazen violence and continued presence of gang activity on the local and national policy agendas. Though Delta does not have a specific gang enforcement unit, their philosophy of ‘no call too small’ appears to offer the same net effect. In Delta, Amanda noted that they have had some success with disruption: We target the high risk behavior…the drug dealing, the money laundering. You’ve got a very well rounded business, and you’ve got the bosses, and your accountants, and everybody’s got their job, and its running very smoothly. But if we could take out one, maybe two of those key players, whether it be charges, or just disrupting them, or moving them, or causing them to have…a ‘no contact’ or ‘curfew’, that takes them away from that business, and then it’s a weakness -Amanda, DPD Perceived Efficacy Officers in this study indicated that curfew checks were both a successful strategy and, at times, a double-edged sword. The inadmissible patron program was perceived by police to be a valuable tool in eliminating public perceptions of the glamor of gang life, offering police the capacity to eject gang-involved individuals from popular licensed establishments. Most interesting was the use of non-criminal legislation, perceived by police to be one of the most successful enforcement strategies to interrupt and disrupt gang activity given the swift, severe, and certain nature of the punishment. It would appear that the provincial government devised and 54 At the time of the interviews, APD did not have a dedicated gang enforcement unit as it was previously disbanded. A four member Gang Crime Unit (GCU) was established in January 2018 (Hopes, 2018). 55 At the time of the interviews, Surrey RCMP was not participating in the Barwatch program which they later initiated in December 2018. 239 implemented policy solutions implementing harsher civil forfeiture laws clearly intended to give the police more power to respond to gangs and gang violence outside the restrictive parameters of the Criminal Code of Canada. On the whole, the police officers that participated in this research spoke positively of specific efforts in prevention, intervention, and enforcement but were generally dismayed by the overall lack of significant improvement in addressing issues of gang violence in the Lower Mainland. The perspective of individual police officers, and whether their prevention and intervention efforts were successful seemed very much dependent on their role. Generally, the managers I spoke with were more positive about efforts in prevention and intervention that move beyond the traditional purview of police. Officers who worked frontline responding to gang violence were understandably less positive, and expressed greater frustration given that they interact daily with gang-involved individuals. These officers generally had less confidence in the system and sometimes perceived that the only consequence for these young ‘gangsters’ was the violence they inflicted upon one another: We are either hoping for a ‘Hail Mary’ or it is all lip service. We are either going to just stand there and collect the bodies, or put people in handcuffs. But the people in handcuffs…they will go through the revolving door, and then they will be out there (again). And then, we will collect the bodies. -Shane, APD Amanda with DPD expressed frustration with the long game, indicating that as soon as the leaders of one gang were effectively policed, another individual or group replaced them seeking the opportunity to fill the void, to produce the supply of illicit drugs that remains in steady demand. We have gone in and infiltrated and taken down large drug runners and drug dealers and some of the higher echelon. But then, that weakness is seen by the others. Now there’s an area that is free, there’s opportunity, and they move right in. It’s just a frustrating game of ‘whac-a-mole’. -Amanda, Delta Mangat (2015) noted that as a result of the destabilization of power, gang activity has been increasingly chaotic with smaller criminal organization competing for influence of the illicit drug trade. It would seem that this frustration experienced even when the police achieve what would reasonably be considered ‘success’ from their perspective has likely contributed to the recognition that enforcement efforts alone are incapable of resolving gang violence. 240 ‘We Can’t Arrest Our Way Out of This’ The title of this research emerged from police officers and organizations describing their inability to successfully suppress gangs in the Lower Mainland noting repeatedly ‘We can’t arrest our way out of this’. In 2016, Delta Police Chief Neil Dubord was quoted in the Surrey Now Leader as saying “the commitment to partnerships is an acknowledgement that “we are not going to arrest our way out of problems” (Bucholtz, 2016). This was echoed by then Chief Superintendent Bill Fordy who attended a community forum and said “We will arrest the people who are involved in this, I am confident,” and then noted “What I am concerned about is next year and the year after that and after that” (Lovgreen, 2016). Supt. Fordy then suggested that much broader community engagement is required noting that the community “Can't simply rely on the police to try to arrest their way out of the situation” (Lovgreen, 2016). This discourse has remained consistent across time and different police organizations have come to recognize the magnitude of the problem as extending beyond gang violence to the illicit narcotics that are fuelling it. The 2017 VPD report The Opioid Crisis – The Need for Treatment on Demand demonstrated that the police are challenged by the lack of available resources and stated “We can’t arrest our way out of the opioid crisis” (p.21). Bill McKinnon, former Superintendent of the Kelowna RCMP, now Public Safety Officer there wrote in his 2018 Report on Public Safety that: “The one thing I know for sure: we can’t arrest our way out of this crisis. Enforcement plays an important role in dealing with the issues our community now faces, but this is only one part of the equation. Enforcement only deals with the symptoms and not the causes.” (McKinnon, 2018, p.3). In February 2019, Abbotsford Police Chief Mike Serr addressed city council positing that “we are not simply going to arrest our way out of the gang violence. We have to take it from a multi-pronged, multi-faceted approach” (Hopes, 2019). These sentiments were echoed by officers in both Abbotsford and Surrey: We can't just say we will arrest more people and that will fix it, no. I mean we should be arresting people, if you are out there dealing drugs, or being a violent criminal, the police should deal with you. But, as far as fixing the problem we are just a part of that. We are not the whole thing. -Oakley, APD We’re not going to arrest ourselves out of any problems…we won’t disrupt ourselves out of any problems.... There has to be a really fulsome piece. These are such big issues, they really are. What do you do to impact demand? -Kevin, Surrey RCMP 241 Kevin’s astute observation that there has been little impact on demand for illicit substances despite more than ten years of persistent gang violence remains a significant challenge as the demand for supply of illicit narcotics is fueling the hedonistic capitalist desires motivating young people in BC’s Lower Mainland to become gang-involved (Bhat & Tweed, 2018; McConnell, 2015; Surrey, 2018). In 2016, then Surrey RCMP Superintendent Bill Fordy insisted “The reasons why they are involved in the violence hasn't changed, it's the draw that these young men have in making easy money” (Lovgreen, 2016). This was echoed by participants: Combatting the fast money is really difficult…if you can’t get them away from the money then it’s really difficult to get them out of there. -Nate, APD Take the profit out of the drugs. That’s the only way you're going to deal with gangs. They want the money, the girls, and the Kardashian lifestyle. If you could take the profits out of it, you could reduce gangs in BC to almost nothing. If there is no profit in it, why would you do it? -Dave, Surrey RCMP Gene in Delta suggested that failure to effectively address addiction issues in BC has led to an impossible situation where the demand is ever-increasing and argued that more needed to be done to address substance abuse at the level of the individual user if there is any hope in reducing the gang violence fueled by the Lower Mainland drug trade: You’ve got to (cut the head) off the snake…instead of going after the major dealers, go down to (address) the users. -Gene, DPD This reluctance to rely solely on gang enforcement efforts as an auspicious strategy that fails to have any effect on the end user was echoed by Dave in Surrey: I know the 4-pillar approach and I understand it. It’s (substance abuse is) a social issue. It’s a disease that needs to be dealt with. If you want to treat it as cancer, then enforcement is not going to work. You need to go to the doctor to get treatment. -Dave, Surrey RCMP The police officers that identified a need for a whole of community approach to mental health and substance abuse are well supported in the literature. A metanalysis of 39 qualitative studies published from January 2000 to March 2018 exploring the views of drug users of amphetamine type stimulants found that: There is substantial evidence that drug dependent individuals are likely to have frequent and often sustained interactions with criminal justice, social service and both primary and secondary health-care systems, yet policy responses are too often fragmented and uncoordinated (O’Donnell et al., 2019, p.44). 242 The argument for a coordinated public health approach to serious social problems is not novel. This chapter sought to assemble the prevention, intervention, and suppression strategies implemented in three Lower Mainland communities from the perspective of the police officers as policy actors responsible for the development and implementation of these strategies. A best practice model of policy development seeks to identify the policy problem, use an evidence-based methodology of rigorous evaluations of similar projects informed by theory and research to develop a selection of policy options, and develops a comprehensive analysis of the potential intended and unintended consequences of each option. The options and analysis are then presented to decision makers for assessment. Once a policy option has been selected, appropriate attention should be paid to the intricacies of implementation, including development of appropriate partnerships, assurance of program fidelity, and building in program evaluation measures from the start. Ideally, best practices are based on knowledge derived from rigorous evaluations of interventions reported in peer-reviewed literature. However, many factors complicate this approach for gang violence prevention efforts. First, there are relatively few longitudinal and randomized-control studies. Second, while some studies have evaluated the outcome of interventions, they have not typically evaluated the effectiveness of individual implementation practices. Therefore, best practices remain somewhat elusive. Instead, at best, police organizations rely on common practices or programs, learning from the anecdotal experiences of others. At worst, police organizations are left navigating the development and implementation of new anti-gang initiatives without evidence or direct experience. Undoubtedly, the lack of empirical evidence to support the programs and practices that are common in gang prevention, intervention, and suppression across police organizations is inherently problematic. As a result of the dearth of research, police are developing policy based on outdated or weak Canadian studies, or research produced in other countries, limiting their efforts to doing what others have been doing, or using their instincts and experiences, rather than data and evidence, upon which to base decisions and activities (Huey & Ricciardelli, 2016). Given this, it is not surprising that there is no indication, even from the officers themselves that any one police program is demonstrating long-term success. Though, in the absence of evaluation, it is impossible to determine this empirically. This lack of evidence means that police are acting as policymakers, developing policy alternatives and making decisions with an 243 insufficient evidence base, and in the absence of coherent understanding and guidelines for evaluating the efficacy of implemented policy solutions. Given this, it is not surprising that much of the literature on gangs maintains the call for more rigorous research and evaluations into the effectiveness of long-standing gang prevention, intervention, and suppression strategies, echoed here. The idea that police policy and practice should be evidence-based is simple, but it is not easy. Martin & Mazerolle (2016) cautioned that “the rhetoric of being evidence-based far outstrips the reality” (p.34). There is little doubt that there is value in evidence-based policing, but several factors hinder the capacity to achieve the oft-repeated goals of best practice policy development, implementation, and program evaluation. To this end, scaling up and contributing to the evidence base were not perceived by participants as likely contributions in the near future. The message is clear; it is vital to evaluate prevention and intervention strategies not only to determine what worked, but also to understand why it worked. This information will assist police organizations develop or select policy response strategies that are most likely to be effective given their local context. Moreover, once a strategy has been adopted, significant attention to implementation, including documenting the steps, assuring attention to program fidelity, and being cognizant of the potential for unintended consequences or iatrogenic effects, is necessary. From there, the police and community organizations responsible for anti-gang programs must engage in constant and methodologically rigorous evaluation to determine whether what they are doing shows signs of success. This type of rigorous evaluation is accomplished using a mixed methods approach designed to measure the program’s direct and indirect effects on violent crime, identify and assess any unanticipated consequences or potential iatrogenic effects, and determine whether any changes are necessary to deliver the program more efficiently and effectively. Given the ever-expanding expectations of fiscal accountability in policing (Griffiths et al, 2014; Public Safety Canada, 2013), it is equally important to understand which programs do not work so that investments of time, money, and effort are not wasted, and the potential for iatrogenic effects mitigated. The consistent assertion that policing efforts to reduce gang violence in the Lower Mainland have been challenged by structural barriers internal to police organizations including the existence of jurisdictional silos and the constraints of policing as a reactive institution will be examined in the next chapter. This will be followed by a consideration of the challenges related 244 to the capacity of the police organizations given the expectations that police officers to be the primary mental health responders and addictions counsellors. Finally, I shall consider the context of resource-related challenges where the police have come to be expected to be ‘everything to everybody’ while also providing effective and efficient response to calls for service. 245 Chapter 7. Structural, Capacity, and Resource Challenges A comprehensive understanding of the barriers identified by participants at the local level is important as they are persistent and continue to affect the quality and nature of police and policy efforts in response to gangs in BC’s Lower Mainland. This chapter will report the findings derived from asking police officers about the process of policy creation and implementation within their organization, and offer thematic analysis of the responses provided by police related to the structural, capacity, and resource barriers they have experienced in their efforts to respond to the persistent policy issues related to gang violence in BC. This findings chapter is important because it identifies, from the perspective of the police, the challenges they have experienced and, from their responses, suggests a way forward that mobilizes broader community, public health, and government engagement focused on countering the effects of the austerity measures of late, and broadening the social safety net to provide much needed services in mental health and addictions response. While not prescriptive, the call for broader societal engagement in forging a way forward suggests that rather than focusing exclusively on gangs, the intervention focus could shift to the end user, in efforts to reduce the demand for illicit narcotics that fuels the capacity for predatory accumulation of wealth sought by gang members in BC. Policy Creation and Implementation When asked about the ways in which the policy responses described above were developed and implemented at the local level, a consistent narrative emerged among Surrey RCMP officers that policy is developed reactively, and often at the frontline: How are they developed?... Probably in reaction. Like, if this file happens now, we just dealt with this, maybe we need to develop a policy based (response) to stop that from happening in the future. And I think that’s how most policies get developed. It’s kind of a reaction to what happens. – Alexander, Surrey RCMP Again, this narrative was premised on the notion that policy options are developed and implemented as a reaction to a specific event: We would all go to the town meeting on something like a homicide, and we would accept full responsibility. In those gruesome circumstances, you know, basically all you could say to them was, ‘we can’t guarantee we’re going to resolve this, but we’re going to do everything in our power to, and we will not sleep’ We have that... in the core of our existence here. -Frederic, DPD 246 Dave with Surrey RCMP noted that policymaking from the ground up is widely encouraged in his unit: I really encourage that kind of stuff. I really encourage outside of the box thinking…within the unit... If someone has an idea...the one thing that we...as the RCMP we get hung up on… using the old answer of ‘that’s the way we have always done it’, right? So, if there’s an issue, or if there is a target, or if there is whatever, if guys can think outside the box or look at things differently, unless it’s against policy or something that glaringly could put us at risk, I encourage it…It’s a simple process of writing it up (the idea),…and reviewing it with an objective, and me going ahead and bringing it to upper management and saying ‘we want to try this’. It either has a budget, or doesn’t have a budget. They’ve been good at allowing us to do that. -Dave, Surrey RCMP The officers I interviewed spoke of policy in the language of ‘ideas’. I probed Dave to find out whether he believed a similar mode of thinking existed across the organizations. He replied: At all detachment levels, there are no bad ideas. You have an idea; you take it forward to your supervisor and usually that is brought forward to a briefing. You know, not necessarily new ideas because it’s hard to combat the drugs; there's not a lot of new ideas that are legal that we can do…but I think there’s a communication line that allows anybody who has a good idea to voice it, and I think if it’s a good idea that works, senior management would support it. -Dave, Surrey RCMP Hayden, a manager with Surrey RCMP offered a similar narrative noting that policies around what is needed to be successful generally come from the frontline: I sit down with the guys, and say ‘what do we need to do our jobs better’. So, we come back with equipment, with training ideas, and all that kind of stuff. And that gets put forward for assessment and realization. -Hayden, Surrey RCMP Alexander, a frontline constable suggested that members could even contribute suggestions and ideas beyond the purview of their current unit: You would probably have to go to your supervisor, if they think it’s a good idea it, would go up (to management) …even if they’re not in a unit…they could go to a specific unit and say, ‘you know what I have this idea’. -Alexander, Surrey RCMP Jamie, another manager with the RCMP agreed, suggesting that Surrey has an ‘open door’ policy: Doors are open, right? You could always bring your idea up (to management), and it’s well received. At the end though, the final words come about, and it’s pushed down on us. But I mean it…there’s lots of round tables, and everybody is allowed to have his opinion. -Jamie, Surrey RCMP 247 I asked Jenna if she could tell me about any specific instances of policy being developed from the ground up in Surrey. She recounted the policy development that resulted in Surrey officers carrying naloxone: We saw huge issues (with fentanyl), we saw it coming in the community. Basically, it took a lot of red tape to go through. Fortunately, what happened was the business case was ahead of… this trend, and by the time the decision was made, it was a ‘yes’ that we were going to allow officers to carry naloxone, and that is when we hit the crisis. So, we were well ahead of all of the city police forces…we were able to get it up and running fairly quickly and basically get it deployed because it is great. We are a large municipality, so we have the ability to have fire (departments) with naloxone, we have ambulance (EMS) with naloxone, but we have to remember…we also police in some small rural areas, and you have members going to scenes sometimes as the only person. They are having to deal with someone who is basically (dying of) an overdose and if they do not have naloxone, they will die. We had the ability to…think ahead of that and it was great. -Jenna, Surrey RCMP In Delta, Amanda suggested she is fortunate to work in a small department: We are very lucky here because we don’t have to the check boxes that have to go through a hundred people, and we don’t have to go through Ottawa. I’m working with the drug section, working with UCOs, working with agents, working with all these different avenues. When we come with this new idea that we haven’t used before…we’ll take this to our one boss, who will take it to our Inspector, who will take it to the Chief, and it will get signed off… It’s so much easier here than it would be if I working in a RCMP unit or even VPD, they are smaller but still large department. -Amanda, DPD The second narrative that emerged was the notion of police responses not as set ‘policy’ but emerging by looking at what other units or agencies are doing: Curfew checks, working/liaising with probation to make sure the offender is monitored and things like that, there’s no rigid policy in place on how to do it. That is definitely something that I think we struggle with, and we have approached other units to kind of see what they do, and the consistency of it is there, the approach is the same, but it’s not a rigorous tool that we use or anything like that. It’s not a set policy or process. -Patricia, APD Shane, also in Abbotsford reasoned that policy development of Abbotsford’s media relations strategy was very dependent on looking to what Vancouver has done, which he perceived was the result of their Chief having come from there. He suggested that Abbotsford’s media presence and policies that supported the fundamental idea of respecting the media and being open and transparent very much came from the Vancouver model. Shane felt the results of Abbotsford’s media policies were very positive: We did what a lot of police departments have done, and we did one of those community surveys. This time it was online to cut to the chase of all of the incredible things that the APD have done from the Christmas cards…to arrests of bad guys for all sorts of different heinous things. Cross 248 border guys, all that great stuff. The number one thing that the majority of people who had positive things to say about the APD identified was our media and our social media presence. -Shane, APD In Delta, officers noted that there were no clear policies on the intervention and suppression of gangs, but that new policy in that area was being developed by another police officer: We don’t have policy when it comes to that. No published policy. We have practice, we have our operational standards…I understand that one of our members is currently writing policy, but I have yet to see that, so I can’t speak to it. -Amanda, DPD I probed Amanda about why she thought gang policy was being developed at that time (the interview was in Fall 2016). She suggested that it was because, until that point, Delta hadn’t really experienced an issue with gangs, noting: 2015 was when we started seeing a lot of the overflow. But again, the mindset with a lot of people (police) was that we don’t have a gang problem, it’s not here, we do a good job of keeping our bubble nice and safe. But, the overflow, and seeing a lot more shootings…I think that’s why it’s now being developed. -Amanda, DPD Amanda’s reference to ‘overflow’ is a colloquial reference that implies that the problem is actually one from Surrey that (like water) leaks over the border into Delta. Some of the officers suggested that sometimes, policy interventions were created in which the intentions were not wholly transparent. River in Abbotsford noted that policy responses have been developed and implemented that ultimately lacked foundations. He offered that the parent help line was one of them arguing that it was established and advertised to parents that they could call the help line and the police would provide support and assistance for their gang-involved children. River recalled that once the parent help line was established, there weren’t any meaningful systems put into place that dictated what to do, or what could be done if the phone rang. He called these types of policies ‘smoke and mirrors’ and said: I keep referring to it as the smoke and mirror thing. I think it is just exactly that, we are going to provide the appearance that we are doing something, but if something really bad happens people are going to start going, ‘So what exactly did you do?’. – River, APD It is distinctly possible that upon implementation of the parent help line there were systems implemented that River just was not aware of. Either way, this frustration is likely indicative of internal communication challenges. 249 Structural Challenges to Effective Police Responses At the outset, this research intended to examine, at a broad level, the capacity of the three organizations to create and implement policy, to transfer policy to other jurisdictions, and to inform the development and implementation practices that could then be ‘scaled up’. The interviews with police revealed that this capacity was very limited with several structural conditions hindering progress; the ongoing institutional silos, and the reactive nature of policing more generally, both of which have long characterized police organizations. A comprehensive understanding of these structural barriers is important at the local level because they are persistent and continue to affect the quality and nature of police and policy efforts in response to gangs in BC’s Lower Mainland. Silos The police officers interviewed in this research suggested that institutional silos remain a significant barrier, characterized by very little sharing of experiences across organizations. The patchwork nature of policing in BC’s Lower Mainland was discussed extensively in Chapter Five. What was perhaps less obvious was the silos that remain characteristic of policing in this space. Generally speaking, each anti-gang initiative, like much of the other police-related information, remains largely contained in institutional silos (Sheptycki, 2004). Participants in this study frequently noted that jurisdictional issues were impeding their abilities to effectively and efficiently monitor gang members, who were inherently mobile, frequently crossing numerous policing jurisdictions: It's the age-old issue… of siloed police departments. At best you’re getting the same people because... the gang members we have in Abbotsford, they pop up in Surrey probably a couple of times a day, and maybe into Delta. They’re going back and forth, yet the police don't. -Dylan, APD Integrated units have the capacity to follow gang-involved individuals across jurisdictions, but given the organizational need for operational response, general duty members are unable to do so. Police officers interviewed for this research found this inherently frustrating and frequently suggested that the gang members were well aware of their limited geographic capabilities, therefore, intentionally moving through and out of jurisdictions when encountered by police. Beyond the frustration expressed by officers that the gang members had greater mobility than the 250 police, Thomas in Surrey expressed the frustration inherent in inter-jurisdictional conflict where information sharing and open lines of communication were generally not the norm: Key problems for police are communication and working together. We have silos, we still have silos even though they have been for years, and decades, trying to get rid of that, we still do. -Thomas, Surrey RCMP Interestingly, several of the officers indicated that they believed the siloes are reinforced by competing agendas: Everyone has their own agendas, and their own rules from their jurisdictions. A lot of the municipals operate in their own way, the majority of the RCMP jurisdictions operate in a certain way; even within those silos everybody has their own set agendas. -Nixon, Surrey RCMP Some saw it as a relationship characterized by a persistent ‘us vs. them’ mentality. Brianna in Abbotsford said: In the Lower Mainland municipal agencies, we all work together quite well and share information, share training, share whatever…and we always fight with the RCMP’. -Brianna, APD Concerns related to the siloed nature of policing in BC’s Lower Mainland go back to the early 1980’s when serial killer Clifford Olsen abducted teenagers from one jurisdiction and dumped their bodies in another. At that time, there was almost no cross-jurisdictional communication (Holmes & Northrup, 2010). As noted previously, the siloed and non-communicative nature of Lower Mainland police organizations was clearly articulated in Oppal’s (2012) inquiry into the missing and murdered women taken from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and later found deceased on a Port Coquitlam farm. Some participants suggested that the silos were not intentionally being reinforced; it was simply a function of the ever-changing roles in policing. One participant posited that, at one time, he knew all the drug officers in other jurisdictions, but he now realizes that they have all moved to other positions or retired. Though technically speaking the police are able to share information via the shared police database, several officers insisted that it was often unproductive as the system was designed to capture information and is not particularly adept at producing easily consumable information. It would seem that after almost 40 years of discourse around the siloed nature of policing in BC’s Lower Mainland, concerns remain. 251 Reactive Policing The focus of this section is the reactive nature of policing experienced by virtually all police organizations. At the most basic level, a crime occurs, the victim calls 911, and the police respond. This model is reinforced hundreds (if not thousands) of times daily in every police jurisdiction. Scholarly literature over the past 15 years included significant efforts seeking to move beyond reaction to a place of prediction using intelligence modelling, social network analysis, and predictive policing. While that area offers a rich and important literature, it is well beyond the scope of this dissertation. Instead, what will be offered here is a lens from the perspective of the police interviewed for this research to the challenges officers were experiencing in efforts to move beyond reactive policing: We are constantly putting out fires… At one point we had a ‘green team’ because we had such a huge grow operation problem here in Abbotsford. So, we seconded a whole bunch of people…and we put together like 14 investigators, and we kicked the shit out of the grow ops for about 6 months. But, when we were doing that the B & E's went out of control, so all of sudden we had to pull everyone out to go and work B & E's. That is the way it works…it is reactive and not being very successful. -Garret, APD Thomas in Surrey also expressed frustration with the reactive nature of police responses: So that is one of the problems…a lot of the time in Surrey…it is very reactive…James Bacon gets shot at, we are reacting to that. Bacon brothers beat up someone at McDonald’s, we are reacting to that...the shooting at T-barz, we are reacting to that…with all the highfliers in the gang world, they are recognized, those files are worked. Generally, we do pretty good on those ones. But then, the volume of stuff going on and the mid-level, stuff just tends to drag on and then be forgotten. Because you have had 15 other things come in. -Thomas, Surrey RCMP The notion that all of the resources were sometimes dedicated to the really big files leaving very few resources to deal with the mid-level drug dealing and gang activity was a persistent theme. Daniel with Delta noted: We invested 10 months into this investigation. We had a huge outcome. You know, we seized 1.5 million dollars…it was huge. -Daniel, DPD From a rational perspective, this makes a lot of sense; the big names get the most attention and the police are focused on exerting effective suppression and enforcement strategies. By the same token, it seems illogical to turn away from the mid-level drug dealing activity given that the Lower Mainland has seen the mid-level gang members rise to the upper echelon as soon as a 252 vacuum has been created through death or incarceration. Dylan in Abbotsford noted that when there weren’t dedicated resources to conduct the ‘big’ investigations, the focus would return to street level dealing: If we can get the money for an investigation, we can deploy the strategies that are required …but that requires money. In Abbotsford, we were doing the street level, but it's like a revolving door. You take these guys out, somebody else...the bosses weren't touched it was the underlings that were getting taken out... just yeah it hits them financially, but there making so much money that... -Dylan, APD In discussing both the large files and the low-level investigations, Cohen in Abbotsford suggested that it all seems kind of pointless given the low likelihood of incarceration or any meaningful punishment. For sure we arrest guys for drug dealing, but we don't get a lot of traction doing that. -Cohen, APD Patrick in Surrey also indicated that reactive policing isn’t being very effective in deterring continued criminal activity because the benefits outweigh the costs: It also makes drug profits, crime profits a viable choice because of what you put in and what you get...A) we have to catch you, B) the courts tend to do nothing; it tends to be a good rate of return for that lifestyle choice – Patrick, Surrey RCMP Grayden in Surrey echoed this, but offered some insight suggesting that instead: Maybe we should turn that around and put more money into that stuff, into the proactive stuff as opposed to the reactive stuff. -Grayden, Surrey RCMP Given the rapid nature of technological change, it is distinctly possible that within the next few years there could be advances in policing that allow organizations to become more proactive than reactive, but until then, participants indicated that the situation is likely to remain status quo: I can't speak from any kind of empirical data analysis; I am just telling you that I see the same guys over and over. Guys getting caught with a gun selling dope, they do not seem to go anywhere for very long…I think what it is going to take is a more concentrated effort than we are either willing or able to do, I do not know if it is resourcing, or if it is... I mean I am sure it is all part of it, but I think this sort of largely reactive approach is not really... I do not know if it is doing enough. -River, APD By and large, the police officers interviewed for this research indicated that while the proactive efforts they reported involvement in are considered valuable, the police are not ‘winning the war’ and attributed this to the reactive nature of policing: 253 I mean if it wasn't so serious, I would laugh my head off…It's a severe lack of planning, I find that policing now has become purely reactive. Like we try and get ahead of it, but the problem is we're not looking 10 years down the road, we are only looking at the immediate… we just become completely reactive to whatever is happening this week and next week it will be a different problem. -Flynn, APD Perceptions of the reactive nature of policing combined with the limited resources was described as creating particular challenges related to resources: The biggest problem is that we don’t have an endless budget. We don’t have the ability to actually even know how big the (criminal) organization is. By the time we get caught up, we’re already behind. Because that proactive piece is missing, I don’t have the chance to reach out to individuals to stop them before they become gangsters. -Dave, Surrey RCMP Capacity & Resource-Related Challenges Officers suggested that beyond the structural barriers, numerous additional barriers exist that are beyond the purview of their capabilities, capacity, and resources of municipal police organizations, and that these issues were contributing to their incapacity in effectively reducing gang violence. From the interviews, three distinct barriers emerged: the dearth of community-based social welfare services in mental health and addictions, rendering police as frontline crisis responders, the incapacity and lack of resources available to municipal police for investigation and interdiction of internationally smuggled illicit narcotics, and the capacity of police to act as policymakers in the development and implementation of responses to gang violence. Mental Health & Addictions Beyond the challenges internally, police officers contended that police are under-resourced and as a result of the dearth of mental health and addictions resources, they are being stretched beyond their capacity: We are so stretched, and again, trying to be everything to everybody… There are mental health problems in the community? We will deal with it. I do not know how you fix that. -River, APD This is echoed in the literature where Bhayani & Thompson (2017) suggested that: Due to cutbacks in human service provision over the last several decades, along with fundamental changes in mental health policies and a critical shortage of mental health resources in Canada, which have put police and persons with mental health and other vulnerabilities/challenges to their well-being on a ‘collision course’ (p.169). 254 Police across all three jurisdictions noted the increasing number of calls for service related to mental health and addictions. Since 2016, police across the province have been carrying Naloxone, at great cost to individual detachments. Frederic in Surrey admitted dismay that naloxone was coming from the policing budget: Narcan is two hundred bucks, and the detachment spent seven hundred and something thousand dollars to give each of us Narcan, which translates into 5 or 6 police officers that they could've hired. And Narcan’s got an expiry date, so you kind of use it or it’s gone… every year now, we’re going to add a million dollars into the budget to spend on Narcan? -Frederic, Surrey RCMP Ivan, who is now retired spoke of what he perceived to be the cause: As a new police officer, I started out working in the Skids in the 80s. I remember when they closed down Riverview because our problems in the Skids went right through the roof. We went from dealing with robberies and stuff like that, and then we became social workers looking after mentally ill people. We were inundated with people with mental health issues, and they went down to the skids and they became victims. It was unbelievable. Closing Riverview was the worst thing we have ever done. Lots of them weren't addicts! They just got sent down there because where else are they going to go? Where else could they afford? They go off their medication, and they are schizophrenics,…and they became victims…It was so sad to watch and I still do not know why to this day that they did it. - Ivan, APD Jenna, a manager with Surrey RCMP was really well versed in the current state of treatment and recovery services in her community. Early in the interview she reasoned that the City of Surrey has more than half a million residents and is the fastest growing community in BC. In describing the dearth of treatment services she said: If you look at it, we have 30 (treatment) beds in Surrey, we have 24 that are adult and 6 that are youth. It's based on a medical model which basically means alcohol and benzos (prescription drugs) take priority over other clients that we are trying to assist. There are day programs and things to that effect, but if we do not have people housed in an area that is safe, they will never, ever recover. Especially now that we have more potent drugs like fentanyl and analogs. My answer is we need more beds, and we need more social detox programs. We need more places that we can take individuals at their current stage. So that we have the ability to liaise people into the services for that will work for them. -Jenna, Surrey RCMP The frustration felt by police related to the dearth of support for addictions offered across the social and socioeconomic strata was echoed by officers across the three jurisdictions: There are not enough beds for treatment. A thousand times a day a lot of addicts, at least the hardcore ones, want to quit. They tell themselves ‘I’m not gonna do it (drugs) again today’, and they wind up doing it again, they can’t stop themselves I’ve had lots of individuals that I have spoken to that I say, ‘hey I could take you to a treatment place right now’. I’ve driven people to treatment centers, but they have to be clean for 24 hours, 36 hours, 72 hours before they can be 255 admitted. How do you get them clean for 72 hours? I can’t lock them in a hotel, I could take them to jail and throw them in jail and hope they stay there for 72 hours but that’s not going to work. So, there are gaps in the system, where I think if those holes are filled it may help. -Dave, Surrey RCMP How many times does the same person have to overdose before we can say under the Mental Health Act that they do not have the ability to care for themselves? When you have overdosed three times, and you keep doing drugs, maybe it is time for us to say ‘You know what? We are going to apprehend you, to try and help you’. - Oakley, APD You have kids that you know are addicted, who are making poor choices and can’t function properly. Why can’t we hold them, and why isn't there a (detox) spot for them? That’s the problem. You can’t incarcerate kids in place of social measures, so, even if I want to hold a kid, until their treatment bed is open you can’t. Nope, you can’t do that. -Gene, DPD Jenna also spoke of concerted departmental efforts to manage concerns related to addiction and substance use in their communities. We have done a really good job here with the Surrey outreach team in trying to address social issues. We have 12 members on the strip trying to get to the root cause of the issues, and trying to liaise these individuals and provide services when they are ready. Offer a wraparound approach. -Jenna, Surrey RCMP The concerns expressed related to the dearth of services related to addiction were peripheral to the primary subject matter of gangs, but participants weaved these concerns together referencing the supply and demand model. In Delta, where the youth liaison officer was focused specifically on at-risk youth, he insisted that even with case-managed and focused attention, the dearth of treatment beds was disheartening: I’ve never had a kid get into treatment in less than five months, and I’ve been doing this for three years. And, I’ve seen dozens, dozens of kids. - Gene, DPD Gene offered clear connection between mental health and addiction asserting that the dearth of resources that exists in addictions is replicated in community-based mental health supports: If you look at [the BC Ministry of] Child and Youth Mental Health, when I first started the wait list [for treatment] was like a year...walking in as a parent and [saying] ‘my kid tried to kill himself three times’, and the doctor tells you to go to Child and Youth Mental Health, okay, here’s your intake, and we’ll call you in a year…it’s crazy. -Gene, DPD 256 In the latter half of the 20th century, numerous factors gave rise to the psychiatric deinstitutionalization movement in Canada, including the recognition that mental health expenses could be drastically reduced by using community-based outpatient settings in favor of inpatient care in psychiatric hospitals. Jutras (2017) asserted that ‘The increase in community-based mental health services has not kept pace with the closure of psychiatric hospitals’ (p.88). What health professionals now call ‘the social determinants of health' are the same factors that determine community safety and well-being: economic and social exclusion; substandard housing; negative parenting; addictions; ignorance and illiteracy; inequitable distribution of social power; mental and emotional disorders; etc. Quite obviously, while police have to respond to any and all threats to personal or public safety, they are not qualified to rectify these more profound community problems (Russell & Taylor, 2015, p.9). The financial and societal costs related to mental health and addictions affects all British Columbians. The provincial government spends approximately $1.5 billion dollars annually on services to address substance use and mental health, plus another $500 million on physician visits and prescriptions (BC, 2019). The BC Provincial Health Officer’s Annual report (2019) contended that research suggests that the economic burden of mental health in Canada is approximately $51 billion annually when accounting for health care costs, lost productivity, and reductions in quality of life (BC, 2019, p.98). BC’s share of the national economic burden is $6.1 billion (BC, 2019, p.15). The Health Officer’s report has an entire section dedicated to ‘positive mental health’ (p.100-103) indicating that in 2013-2014, 68.3% of British Columbians over the age of 12 reported positive mental health. Interestingly, nowhere in the report are specific mental illness strategies addressed, nor are there public health responses for the more than 30% of British Columbians that do not report positive mental health. According to the provincial government, in any given year, mental health and substance abuse affects one in five people in British Columbia (BC, 2019). In her research, Cotton (2004) found that 38% of the police officers she surveyed believed they would not be in the position of having to deal with mental health related issues if it were not for inadequate mental health services in Canada. Gene in Delta was clearly very knowledgeable about the dearth of services available for youth in the community saying there existed no community-based mental health supports capable of assisting youth experiencing mental illness: 257 Technically adolescent psychiatric treatment would be the triage unit (at the hospital), until it gets under control, and then discharge with some kind of care plan. I’ve been to the hospital for discharge plans and for care plans, but I mean it’s few and far between, and it’s pretty extreme…For mental health there’s really not (funding), it’s not even mental health, it’s a diagnosis as a concurrent disorder, and nobody has really been set up for that. They’ve got the ACT teams for adults and they’re trying to start that for kids, but there’s no funding for mental health. -Gene, DPD In recent years there have been concerted efforts to both offer and require police officers to acquire additional training in mental health response. The BC Government report Interfaces Between Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services and Police reported Crisis Intervention and De-escalation training is required for all police officers in BC. The report concluded that: Research has documented higher rates of repeat interaction with law enforcement among individuals with co-morbid mental health and substance use disorders in British Columbia. The rate of repeat apprehension is significantly reduced for individuals with no mental health diagnosis or a non-substance related mental disorder. There is a need for integrated treatment and support from health, justice and social services for individuals with co-occurring disorders (BC, 2018, p.8) That said, the report produced by the BC government contains passages that support the assertion by police officers that they have been left with the responsibility for primary care of mental health and substance use (MHSU) concerns in this province. Specifically: There may be circumstances where a police officer encounters an individual experiencing a MHSU-related crisis, who does not meet the criteria for apprehension under the MHA and has not committed a criminal offence. The police officer may discern that the individual is a person with a mental disorder yet determine that they do not pose a safety risk to themselves or others. In such an instance, a police officer should try to connect the individual to their case manager or for those unattached, connect them with local community mental health and/ or substance use services. Ideally police agencies work with MHSU service providers in their jurisdictions to develop a resource database that a police officer can reference to determine where to transport the individual for non-acute services if the individual voluntarily agrees to that course of action. Some police officers may already be part of an integrated team and be familiar with the individual or appropriate health personnel to be able to direct them appropriately. If such a database is not in place or the police officer does not work as part of an integrated team, local community health clinics or not-for-profit MHSU service providers are good options. The police officer should strive to resolve the crisis and support the individual to access appropriate healthcare services (BC, 2018 p.29). BC’s Provincial Health Officer (PHO) Dr. Bonnie Henry released a report titled Stopping the Harm: Decriminalization of People Who Use Drugs in B.C. asserting that: Law enforcement routinely encounter people living with substance use disorders who need treatment services; however, there is a marked lack of immediately available treatment services or avenues for police to take people with a substance use disorder throughout the province, which 258 leads to the continued cycle of crime, criminal justice system involvement, and perpetuation of addiction (PHO, 209, p.19) In Abbotsford, River posited that the ready availability of illicit narcotics in BC is, from his perspective, the root of the problem: It's all about dope, that's half our problem. Half of our mental health issues in this town are dope induced, so I mean logic would follow that if you reduced the dope, it would reduce the gang problem. -River, APD Though there are challenging issues related to causality in River’s perception that mental health issues are dope-induced, I’ve never heard of an argument, academic or otherwise, that indicates repetitive use of illicit narcotics has positive influences on mental health. As Avery & Barnhill noted in their examination of the challenges in treating co-occurring disorders: Substance abuse can lead to serious depressive and manic symptoms via intoxication and withdrawal, for example, and chronic use of substances of abuse can lead to serious mood problems through a direct physiological effect or as a consequence of maladaptive behaviors and psycho-social stress (2018, p.25). Reducing the flow of illicit narcotics into British Columbia seems like a reasonable answer to reducing the prevalence of gangs, but officers spoke frequently of the incapacity and lack of resources available to municipal police organizations to effectively investigate the importation of illicit narcotics by international organized crime groups, narcotics that are perceived to be at the root of the gang problem in BC. International Smuggling of Illicit Narcotics into BC In each jurisdiction, police officers in this study suggested that gangs in BC were similar to organized criminal networks. This assertion was offered citing examples of the transnational activities of narcotics smuggling, the location of the Lower Mainland on the largely unmanned US border, the presence of two international airports with YVR directly connecting North America with Asia, and the various sea ports of Vancouver identified by Madsen (2018) as a conduit for smuggling illegal drugs from Asia into Canada and America and largely controlled by organized crime groups. Though officers suggested BC could be unique in this sense, comparative data was not sought from other provinces, so it remains possible that this is true but, at this point, there is no data to support their assertion. Cohen in Abbotsford expressed frustration suggesting that the police were largely incapable of doing anything to prevent these 259 activities and argued that international drug smuggling was at the center of gang activity in the Lower Mainland: They have a stream to bring in heroin, or coke, or whatever it is. There's a port, there's an international airport in Abbotsford, there's a river on one side, there's the border on the other side. So, Abbotsford has every single way you can bring in drugs. If you want to mule in drugs in Abbotsford, you can fly a helicopter, you can walk across the border. You want a port? You can just go down the river. If you want an international flight, you can fly into Abbotsford, it really has everything. It has small airstrips, so it's easy to bring dope in here. If you look at Dade County in Miami…the reason cocaine hit Miami and Dade County was people from Columbia…could just fly it right into the port. They would literally fly planes, and…bring boats, it was a way to get it in. You can't do that in Edmonton, you can't do that in Regina, you can't do that in a lot of the cities in the East, right? But you can do it here. -Cohen, APD The concerns expressed by the police interviewed reiterate the conclusions of the research conducted by McConnell (2015). He asserted that the presence of gang members and organized crime at the Port of Vancouver, including the continued employment of 25 longshoremen who are members of the Hells Angels, the limited capacity of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to examine inbound containers (about 3% of 1.5 million containers annually), combined with the inability of the RCMP waterfront team or CBSA to examine export containers for contraband, has led to a situation in which “…members of organised crime have free roam of an international shipping port [and that] is advantageous to their drug trade” (McConnell, 2015, p.39). River in Abbotsford expressed frustration with the inability of a municipal department to combat this: Are we ever going to ever do something at the national level? Notwithstanding the US war on drugs that has been a failure, but how does somebody in Abbotsford that works in law enforcement say, ‘Hey we’ve got to stop this importation of fentanyl from China that you can buy online for a dollar a brick’ How does that work? It has got to be somebody at a much higher level than that. -River, APD Matt (APD) described gangs as being organized and connected locally, provincially, and internationally: These groups were cross-border groups not only in terms of communities, but in terms of regions, and in terms of provinces, and in terms of international ties that they had formed. -Matt, APD Broadly speaking, these types of international networks are far more prevalent in the organized crime literature than in the gang literature (Surrey, 2018). It is seldom that street gangs 260 in the US (or elsewhere) develop and solidify the organized international criminal networks capable of smuggling large-scale quantities of narcotics internationally: I think their influence and power in the Lower Mainland has extended into Canada and well beyond. These little groups of East Indian males and other groups that really don’t have names, these guys are actually moving into large scale distribution. They’re leaving the Lower Mainland, they’re going into Prince Rupert, Prince George, they’re going to the other communities and other provinces, and in some cases other countries to deal drugs. Which is incredible when you think of some little dial-a-doper in the middle of Surrey that’s got a phone and 20 bucks in his pocket is now moving up to a level where they’re actually sending him to countries to pick up drugs. It’s a game changer. -Dave, Surrey RCMP The complexity of these types of investigations was cited as being really problematic, with police unable to identify the importers, even after a significant drug bust: The HA member that is importing a hundred kilos of coke doesn’t care about the low-level guy who is selling a kilo of coke. The low-level guy, even with a kilo of cocaine, won’t know enough to be able to inform on the importer. -Nate, APD The lack of resources available to municipal police efforts in combatting international drug smuggling suggested that federal money should support those efforts: I think that the border needs to clamp down on stuff coming in... It needs to be worked with CBSA. -Oakley, APD In Abbotsford, Matt suggested that gangs became more sophisticated after repeated success in importing drugs were accompanied by the notion that groups would become increasingly difficult to effectively investigate: What you will see is someone who is important. Shirts, nice hair, designer glasses, but no rings or tattoos, and they are strictly business. Not power, not the trappings of power and not the flash. When it goes into the board room, now it becomes much more challenging, where now you have to change your investigative strategies. Always have this response, always have to have this because you do not know who here is going to say, ‘enough is enough’. To break into that, you have to start. And, much like organized crime investigations, there is long term, you'll hit their business, but now it is to identify those people. Ultimately their business, their criminal enterprise, is always conducted in a board room. You know, let’s come to a business agreement, write up a contract, get a notary or a lawyer to approve it, and off they go. So that is where…law enforcement is going to find a challenge, is actually breaking into that corporate headquarters structure and start trying to go after the CEO, COO, CFO, go after those people. -Matt, APD The magnitude of illicit narcotics smuggling that persists in the Lower Mainland is astounding. In November 2019, the Surrey RCMP seized thirty kilograms of cocaine (equivalent to 125,000 doses) with an approximate street value of $1.5 million dollars along with $125,000 261 in cash as the result of a traffic stop (Bolan, 2019b). In January of 2020, the CFSEU-BC seized thirty-eight kilograms of heroin and ten kilograms of imitation Percocet, more than a kilogram of methamphetamine, $20,000 cash and three firearms (Zytaruk, 2020). This is the largest seizure in the history of the CFSEU-BC with a street value of more than $6.5 million dollars, and represents potentially millions of doses of illicit narcotics, all of which are believed to contain fentanyl (Zytaruk, 2020). For context, the population of the entire Lower Mainland is 2.832 Million (Census, 2016). None of the police officers interviewed for this project spoke with any confidence about their ability to investigate or interdict international importations of illicit narcotics, nor did they indicate there were appropriately resourced local efforts to do so. The Constitution Act delegates federal responsibility for the international border, and municipal police organizations in BC have no capacity, nor the resources to dedicate to these efforts despite the local geography, where importation is possible from all sides: the largely unmanned international border to the South, the unpatrolled Fraser river to the North, two international airports, and two marine ports. Police as Policymakers Many of the police efforts discussed in this thesis were funded with support from grants. The bulk of these funds are administered at the federal level through Public Safety Canada and the National Crime Prevention Centre. At the provincial level, the funds are administered through grants from the civil forfeiture proceeds.56 The systemic requirements of many of these grant programs require police to partner with community organizations as grant recipients for prevention and intervention programming, with no evaluation measures built in. Successful grant applications guarantee programming resources, but very rarely fill the gaps left in the organizational chart as a result of the police officers’ redirected focus. This was the case in the Surrey WRAP program as well as Abbotsford In It Together program. In the absence of evaluations and without the requisite empirical data to support continuance of the program in seeking alternative funding avenues, programs frequently come to an end. The In It Together 56 For a comprehensive list of the grants that have been administered through this program dating back to 2012, see: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/crime-prevention/community-crime-prevention/grants 262 program nearly closed its doors due to a lack of funding in 2018, when the United Way stepped in offering $100,00 to keep the program going in the short term (Saltman, 2018). This points to the obvious flaw in the current model of policy development. Police are not educated in, trained in, or experienced in best practices models of policy creation, implementation, and evaluation. Furthermore, by the very nature of the criminal justice system in Canada, the lens of police is often focused exclusively at the individual level of responsibility. In gang prevention and intervention programming, correlates of risk for gang activity at the individual level are only one of five significant domains, the remainder of which fall beyond the purview of police alone. Moreover, police organizations in Canada are largely under-resourced with an ever-expanding role. Finally, the possibility exists that the police are not the people best positioned to develop empirically and theoretically sound prevention and intervention programming. By and large, it is the role of the police to intervene when those programs have been ineffective with their primary role rightly situated in the realm of suppression and enforcement. Police organizations are handcuffed by limited human and financial resources, the extensive reporting requirements related to fiscal accountability, the inherently reactive nature of police response, the exponential expansion of disclosure requirements resulting from stricter legal interpretations of R. v. Stinchcombe,57 the strict legislative timelines resulting from R. v. Jordan,58 the ever increasing demands of the public, and emerging concerns related to the mental health and well-being of officers. To expect that they can also be the organizations responsible for the development, implementation, and evaluation of anti-gang prevention and intervention programming is an ongoing challenge that requires a rethinking of the role of the police, the community, municipal, provincial, and federal governments, and non-governmental organizations in the development, implementation, delivery, and evaluation of anti-gang programs. 57 R. v. Stinchcombe 58 R. v. Jordan 263 Despite these limitations, this research revealed that police organizations in the Lower Mainland communities of Surrey, Delta, and Abbotsford have all demonstrated significant investments of time, resources, and effort in gang prevention and intervention programming, as well as broader community engagement. In all three jurisdictions, the police actively engage with the community in delivering prevention and intervention responses to gang violence. In each community, police organizations demonstrate concerted efforts to partner with community agencies. In Delta, the youth liaison officer and youth counsellor sought to provide wraparound services to at-risk youth. In Surrey, the RCMP has partnered with Surrey Schools in establishing the now ten-year-old Surrey WRAP program, and senior management there developed a SMART table. In Abbotsford, police worked closely with Archway Community Services on a number of youth-focused initiatives including the In It Together program and the West Abbotsford Youth Action Group. However, given the lack of rigorous evaluation and replication studies, there are very few gang-related programs that have proven to be effective at achieving their objectives. That said, the net positive effect of these efforts has been undoubtedly public engagement. Jesilow et al. (1995) in their conclusions demonstrated that the primary indicator of negative attitudes towards the police was based on citizen perceptions of the problems within their communities. When the police did not appropriately intervene to assist in problems that they ‘might do something about’, citizens had negative things to say about the police (p.85). Thus, efforts in community engagement provide police with the forum in which they are seen to be doing something, which many of the officers interviewed for this research insisted offered intrinsic value in the public’s perceptions of police (Hu & Lovrich, 2019). Because the focus of this research was on police response to gangs, many of the programs, committees, community action groups, and policies through which the police in these three jurisdictions engage with civil society are not mentioned here, in part because they are just too numerous to list, but also because the officers interviewed for this research were selected because of their experience with gangs, and are not typically the officers participating in those community engagement efforts frontline. There is little doubt that police in each of these jurisdictions are committed to community partnerships, citizen engagement, and efforts to enhance public safety well beyond the purview of gang-related initiatives. 264 A Way Forward It is not always the case that scholarly efforts will identify a problem and then venture into the dark sea of attempting to identify potential resolutions. In fact, prior to leaving law enforcement to join academia, it was my greatest criticism of the academy. After reading a lengthy peer-reviewed article criticizing immigration policy, the article would just end, and I would be left thinking ‘Okay, now what?’. Having now read the bulk of this thesis, you have likely concluded that the literature is exhaustive, but offers no real answers; there are an enormous number of programs to reduce gang violence, but very few of them have borne out as effective through evaluation, and the interviews with police working in this area for the past ten years suggest that officers are generally pleased with the outcomes of some specific measures, but overall feel they have yet to make a significant impact, and their efforts are significantly hampered by barriers that are structural, capacity, and resource-related. Okay, so now what? As discussed in the introduction, the police require research that is both framed in language that is accessible, and includes concrete recommendations for programs and policy leading to actionable outcomes (Greene, 2015). It is also imperative that the social and political context in which the policies and responses exists are considered so as to make recommendations that are realistic in nature. Giacomantonio (2015) noted that in the realm of policing, the development of new policy is fraught with consequences: The consequences of a bad idea or initiative in policing may acutely impact the lives of citizens in ways that other governmental actors may not. In this sense, police research not only asks of new policy initiatives ‘What is the likelihood that this will improve police practice’, but also, ‘What is at stake if it fails?’ and, often equally importantly, ‘What may be lost even if this succeeds?’ (p.145). Reiner (2012) argued that a criminology that speaks to real world issues is needed now more than ever. Across the organizations, there existed police perceptions suggesting that in order to improve public safety, there is a need for greater societal engagement along with broader shouldering of the responsibility for the social safety net, beyond the efforts of police: It needs to be more than the police participating in this. -Tara, APD 265 I think that it is a systemic thing, I do not think the police have the answer. The police are basically one piece of the puzzle, I think the community is a big piece. I think the courts are a big piece, and I think that we need to get on the same page, everybody. -Oakley, APD The social impact of drugs – health impacts – fentanyl overdoses. We’ve always had overdoses, we just have more now. There is that health and wellness aspect which is just not really being dealt with. -Nate, APD Bhayani & Thompson (2017) suggested that the police are the agency of last resort which the efforts of all others social and human service agencies have proved insufficient. The austerity measures that have characterized the last two decades of social welfare provision in BC have important consequences for the capacity of all human service organizations. I feel sorry in some ways for the management because they get pulled in so many different directions. The downtown businessmen want people on bikes and walking patrols, and people want traffic enforcement, and they want people in the schools, and they want all this stuff and …we have nobody left to go and investigate anything. -Ivan, APD In general, you can’t really do anything beyond the call of duty. You get told do this, and do it that way, whether it does or doesn’t (work)..I don’t know -Emerson, Surrey RCMP Though there is little empirical evidence of success of the existing gang prevention and intervention programs, those programs that have shown any promise were collaborative community partnerships (Wong et al., 2012). As such, the next section of this chapter will focus on the literature that suggests the potential for successful gang responses through police partnerships with a well-functioning and properly resourced public health system along with community partnership with the organizations capable of providing support in the broader social safety net and concordant research that suggests that collaborative strategies are most effective when the contributing organizations are capable of functioning well independently (Peters & Cohen, 2017). Violence as a Public Health Issue According to the World Health Organization, public health refers to all organized measures, whether public or private, to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong life among 266 the population as a whole (WHO, 2016). The public health model addresses a wide range of public health concerns, including preventing injuries, promoting and encouraging healthy behaviours, responding to disasters and assisting with recovery, protecting against environmental hazards, and preventing epidemics (Weine, Eisenman, Kinsler, Glik, & Polutnik, 2017). More than 30 years have passed since violence was first recognized as a public health issue, when epidemiological research methods were applied to homicide for the first time. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the public health model has increasingly taken centre-stage in global responses to violence (Mitton, 2019). The WHO placed public health at the center of its global strategy for combatting violence, and the World Bank described the public health approach as the most effective form of violence intervention (Mitton, 2019; World Health Organization, 2002). Mitton (2019) argued that the advantages of a public health approach to violence were considerable, such as employing policies and practices that offered an adequate definition of the problem, identified causes, specified a target population, and began prevention and intervention planning. This effort in planning offered the capacity for preventive interventions that were precisely linked to the understanding of risk and protective factors targeted for change (Weine et al., 2017). In this emerging body of literature calling for an enhanced partnership between police and public health organizations, scholars recognized that, until recently, neither public health agencies nor police organizations considered policing as part of a public health response to violence (Shepherd & Sumner, 2017). However, formal police–public health partnerships recognized the distinctive yet complementary roles of both partners and provided communities with a much fuller picture of violence and its risk factors. Decker, Wilcox, Holliday, and Webster (2018) called for a collaboration in which the public health system would work with the education system, the criminal justice system, and other stakeholders and sectors to address the public health burden of interpersonal violence and suicide. They also noted that this would provide a mechanism through which violence could be prevented more effectively and which had the potential to enact and uphold beneficial public policy to ensure a well-balanced field response to violence that engendered community approval. The model proposed by Decker et al. (2018) called for a three pillared public health approach to intimate partner violence, including: 1. Using primary and secondary prevention to prevent violence and its recurrence. 267 2. Identifying and supporting survivors to mitigate the health and social impact of violence after it has occurred, and 3. Promoting equitable, accessible justice processes that hold offenders accountable (p.665). Riley and Brewer (2009) argued that police departments and public health departments had many elements in common and there was a benefit to looking at the quality improvement initiatives implemented by one another as an opportunity for learning and policy transfer. Though there are significant organizational and structural dimensions that differ between police and public health organizations, the mandate of public protection and increasing safety for the public is held in common. That said, there seem to be clear inequities in structural power at play in partnership efforts that are often fraught with discord because, although societal problems are the focus in both law enforcement and public health, there is conflict in the differing cultures and their seemingly contradictory organizational principles in precisely how those goals ought to be achieved. Therefore, effective collaboration requires moving past those siloes and differing perspectives to the identification of shared desirable outcomes and a combined commitment to rigorous evaluation (van Dijk, Herrington, Crofts, Breunig, Burris, Sullivan, & Thomson, 2019). Much like the risk factors identified in the literature on youth deviance, the public health model targets social, familial, personal, organizational, and structural factors believed to increase risk with very specific mitigation measures (Weine et al., 2017). The more specific the risk factors identified and the more specific the target population, the more likely there will be success (Weine et al., 2017). This process has been honed through experience and supported by extensive research and evaluation. What emerged from this process was a “systematic, evidence-based, multidisciplinary set of practices and principles for reaching prevention outcomes in a range of health issues” (Harris-Hogan, Barrelle, & Zammit, 2016, p.9). Policing and Public Health – Not an Oxymoron To date, there has been little collaboration across social problems between criminologists and public health researchers in Canada. This is likely the result of longstanding perceptions among policymakers, clinicians, and researchers that policing and public health have two fundamentally different approaches to reducing violence (Shepherd & Sumner, 2017). In Canada, there is some resistance to police partnering with public health from those in the medical community who perceive the police as contributors to ongoing victimization, particularly of drug users (Collier, 2017). Dr. Mark Tyndall, a population health researcher and director of the BC 268 Centre for Disease Control, was asked to participate in a panel discussion on ‘Integrating Policing and Public Health’ and said “I think it’s an oxymoron to put these things together; these are diametrically opposed concepts when it comes to policy” (Collier, 2017, E760). Yet, individual and community safety is the primary focus and chief concern of both policing and public health officials, and there has been, in recent years, a call for greater collaboration between police and public health officials tasked with preventing and responding to violence, despite their disparate organizational cultures (Shepherd & Sumner, 2017). These institutional and philosophical disconnections have been, to some degree, overcome on the frontline. Collaborative relationships between police and health professionals responding to specific public health crises have been long established. Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) in which mental health professionals are paired with police officers to respond to calls for service are considered best practice and have been implemented in communities across Canada, including in the Lower Mainland (Collier; 2017; Shepherd & Sumner, 2017). The deployment of Narcan and Naloxone to frontline police officers is another example of the timely and effective progress of police-public health partnerships (Barry & Chris, 2018). All three communities in this research have dedicated police officers in positions as mental health liaison officers. Beyond frontline responses, police are also responsible for administering individual-level legal protections initially advanced by public health researchers and practitioners, such as police protection orders in situations of intimate partner violence (Shepherd & Sumner, 2017). Some researchers and public health officials have recognized the need for police to respond to health concerns. For example, Feighery, Altman, and Shaffer (1991) concluded that public health policy interventions demonstrated little behavioural change in the absence of an enforcement component, and thus enforcement was a necessary component of a successful public health policy. Still, not all researchers and public health officials agree, with many staunchly opposed to the notion of partnerships. In part, this is based on concerns about privacy issues related to information-sharing and the fundamentally opposing philosophies of harm reduction versus enforcement (Collier, 2017). Van Dijk et al. (2019) posited that law enforcement has an important role as a key partner in many public health endeavors. Specifically, they argued that: 269 The absence of recognition has resulted in a generally inadequate approach to research and investigation of ways in which law enforcement, especially police at both operational and strategic levels, can be effectively engaged to actively promote and protect public health as part of a broader multisectoral public health effort (van Dijk et al., 2019, p.287). They concluded that the shared mandate for public health should ensure a significant level of collaboration to protect the health and safety of the public, but that these collaborations are currently inadequate and require improvement (van Dijk et al., 2019). Decker et al. (2018) also suggested that additional collaboration is required and the civil and criminal justice systems accountable for holding offenders responsible for interpersonal violence have an integral role to play as the justice pillars in the Public Health Model. In considering police-public health partnerships, it is important to examine the organizational motivations for participation in this collaboration. When there is not equality across organizations in the commitment to collaboration, a number of risks are presented. Because of the power differential that exists between policing organizations, public health, and the not-for-profit community groups that often deliver community services, attention to the collaborative nature of the relationship is important for sustaining partnerships in the long-term. There are several countries that are far more progressive than Canada in considering the potential opportunities inherent in partnerships between the police and public health. For example, Australia has the Centre for Law Enforcement and Public Health (Collier, 2017), and, in Holland, there is a well-established collaborative relationship between police and public health in recognition that both professions play an integral role in responding to urgent societal issues, and efforts are being made to overcome systemic barriers to cooperation (Collier, 2017). The Jigsaw Puzzle: Police Responses and the Public Health Model The standard typology of police responses including prevention, intervention, and suppression can be mapped onto the public health model with primary programs being those based on prevention, secondary programs focusing on intervention efforts, and the tertiary model encompassing suppression efforts. Lee (2017) posited that the Public Health Model focuses on primary prevention, at the widest scale possible, aiming to prevent negative outcomes before their occurrence through a four-step model: (a) describing and monitoring the problem, and tracking trends; (b) identifying factors that increase risk and those that promote positive behavior; 270 (c) developing and evaluating prevention policies to reduce risk factors and increase positive behavior; and (d) broadly disseminating and implementing these policies and strategies (p.147). Here, the goal is to reduce the number of new cases of a disorder (Harris-Hogan et al., 2016). In effect, the Public Health Model emphasizes the need for multiple and diverse collaborators to address the root causes of gangs that would include providing individuals access to quality education, employment, health and safety, stable housing, and positive parenting (Gebo, 2016). In the public health model, secondary interventions are designed to intervene in cases of specific at-risk individuals exhibiting signs or symptoms of a problem in an effort to divert their behaviour from illegal activities, thereby lowering the incidence of the targeted disorder within the population (Harris-Hogan et al., 2016). Thompson (2009) reasoned that focused public health interventions offer the potential to achieve numerous benefits, including long term reductions in community levels of violence and crime. Decker et al. (2018) argued for the utility of structural interventions available in approaching interpersonal violence via a framework of public health. The Author’s argued that “this public health framework also identifies opportunities for interventions at the structural level, focusing on policies and social norms that influence conditions that spur or prevent violence or increase its lethality” (Decker et al., 2018, p.695). The suggested suppression strategies included implementing restrictive alcohol policies, strict policies related to the purchase and storage of firearms, and weapons prohibitions. Gebo (2016) posited the need to move away from the gang-specific stigmatization and argued that “a public health violence prevention approach may be more successful than a gang-specific focus at the secondary prevention stage. Much more is known about what is successful in preventing violence than what is successful in preventing gangs” (p.379). Tertiary interventions are the most financially intensive and involve physically intervening to treat the symptoms of a problem and decrease its effects in situations of relatively certain consequence (Harris-Hogan et al., 2016). In the public health model, tertiary measures, including incarceration, are typically viewed as a last resort or a “form of quarantine– imposed to stop the violence and to stop the contagion” (Gebo, 2016, p.379). This said, the implementation and use of these measures can cause tension among community partners, who often perceive less need for this type of enforcement or may consider that the police implement these measures too soon in the process or too frequently. According to Gebo (2016), it is logical and practical to 271 address violence as a public health concern, especially for the general population and those at risk for violence, but the challenge of maintaining community/police partnerships given the adversarial nature of discordant beliefs around tertiary strategies remained a significant challenge. When suppression measures are necessary, Decker et al. (2018) argued the positive benefits of implementing a restorative justice framework in aligning the mandates of public health and policing: Restorative justice principles offer a means to align public health and criminal justice across forms of violence. Restorative justice emphasizes repairing the harm that results from violence and providing nonviolent means of conflict resolution. Its dual goals include supporting victims and facilitating community and offender rehabilitation. For community violence, restorative practices include focused deterrence to hold individuals and groups accountable for violence and incentivizing nonviolence, while offering services and supports to offenders who want alternatives to crime and violence. Some evidence exists for reductions in gun violence as a result of such practices and restorative practices are increasingly seen in early, school-based prevention and response programs (Decker et al, 2018, p.72). At its very foundation, the public health model advocates for the inclusion of community as an important stakeholder in responding to public safety threats. This is an important consideration given the longstanding concerns related to policing marginalized communities. Activities under the umbrella of the public health model aim to provide conditions in which people can be healthy, and focus on entire populations, not only individual patients or diseases. Thus, public health is concerned with the total system and not just the eradication of a particular disease, though the public health model is most-often associated with preventing the spread of disease (World Health Organization, 2016). Proponents of the public health model have noted the benefits of its multi-disciplinary nature bringing together health professionals from the areas of sociology, education, public policy, psychiatry, psychology, and communications (Butts, Roman, Bostwick, & Porter, 2015; Gebo, 2016). Scholars have argued that public health professionals use relevant approaches, including the development and implementation of community-based initiatives, administering client services, conducting research and evaluation (an area the field is widely regarded for), and recommending policies (Neville et al., 2015). Given the enormous health and social problems presented by illegal narcotics use in BC, the collaborative and holistic public health model deserves serious consideration. Moreover, Greyson and Johnson (2016) posited that public health as a discipline was concerned with policymaking. This is an important area for criminologists 272 and practitioners to become more engaged with, as the natural evolution from the production of evidence is its mobilization to inform government, and actively influence policy. Community-Based Prevention Models The concept of approaching the prevention of crime through a community model is not novel. In the next section, three community-based prevention models will be examined: Crime Prevention through Social Development, The Spergel Model, and the Boston Ceasefire. Crime Prevention through Social Development Starting in about 1995, Crime Prevention through Social Development (CPSD) as a grant-funded crime prevention initiative gained increasing support and popularity in Canada, including within police organizations (Caputo & Vallee, 2010). The premise of CPSD is that prevention and intervention strategies employing an evidence-based approach should be sought and implemented through community consultation and collaboration. One of the key characteristics of the Canadian experience with CPSD was that it had been community driven and implemented on a relatively small scale (Vallee, 2010). The CPSD approach was premised on focusing on the root causes, including the social, economic, and political risk factors that contributed to crime and disorder, such as structural variables like unemployment, poverty, and marginalization, as well as a lack of social, recreational, and educational opportunities. A comprehensive CPSD strategy should be designed to address the numerous risk and protective factors associated with crime and victimization at the individual, family, peer, and community levels (Linden, 2010). Vallee (2010) argued that CPSD strategies in most Canadian communities could be classified into three general rubrics. The first rubric addresses individual risks for involvement in crime and implemented individual-level strategies focused on addressing existing risk factors and deficits. The second rubric is a family-oriented strategy, such as parenting programs that seek to strengthen family capacity. The third includes broader community-level strategies intended to bolster local capacity to prevent crime (Vallee, 2010). In all of these rubrics, CPSD required building meaningful partnerships to achieve the cooperation of a variety of players involved with community-based, multi-agency, interdisciplinary responses throughout the community (Caputo & Vallee, 2010). A successful CPSD approach ensures that all partners were held accountable for their contributions to specific roles and responsibilities, ensures all 273 partners understand their contributions to the strategy, and implements a strong governance structure to facilitate decision-making (Linden, 2010). Linden (2010) concluded that the CPSD comprehensive approach has yielded a better return on investment than discrete, single-issue approaches (Linden, 2010). It is imperative that community stakeholders, including the police, recognize the interdependence between the health, education, social services, socio-economic, and criminal justice systems. As 24/7 responders, police are often the first to gain insight into a particular issue or problem. However, police officers have traditionally seen themselves as peace officers whose primary responsibilities include public order maintenance and law enforcement. The integration of CPSD requires an expanded role of police officers in terms of community problem solving, builds on their operational knowledge, and enhances their skills and expertise (Caputo & Vallee, 2010). Police officers involved in CPSD are in a unique position of authority to offer legitimacy to a comprehensive community response and help enlist the participation of community representatives. The key to successful CPSD strategies is to maximize the community’s response by sharing decision-making power with other service agencies, including those in the health, social services, child protection, and education sectors (Caputo & Vallee, 2010). As a point of caution, police officers tend to default their attention and focus to individual level culpability and responsibility. In part, this is because the Canadian criminal justice system is designed to focus on issues at the individual level (Caputo & Vallee, 2010). As such, police officers asked to participate in CPSD may require additional training to operate at a social service provision level. While many police agencies espouse a proactive community policing approach, the reality is that they are primarily focused on public safety through the enforcement of law and order. Youth deviance typically includes delinquency, truancy, drugs use, drug trafficking, and participation in gang activity (Linden, 2010). The best response to address such behavior is a coordinated and well-maintained inter-agency partnership response focused on intervention that mobilizes police, the education system, and health and social services. Dunbar, Waller & Gunn (2011) posited that this requires the implementation of programs that work to address the underlying causes of gang membership including racism and discrimination, child poverty, unemployment, barriers to education, and mental health (p.171). When established and well maintained, these programs combined with inter-agency partnerships are uniquely 274 positioned to assist young people in addressing the social, economic, and political factors related to the root causes of crime and victimization. The CPSD approach was generally well supported, but suffered from lack of funding, or any organization with significant energy to promote it (Dunbar et al., 2011). Given the lack of uptake of CPSD in any meaningful way, it appears to have fallen out of favor of the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS) in recent years, given that the most recent Public Safety report published with a focus on CPSD was in 2005. Moreover, the 2017-2018 evaluation of the NCPS asserted that “the Strategy has consistently promoted a social development approach towards crime prevention, and in recent years has focused on implementing evidence-based models” Public Safety Canada, 2018c, p.1). This is ironic given the complete lack of publicly available evaluations on most NCPS programs. It is an important recognition that CPSD was once considered promising practice, but to be effective it would require significant financial investment in social programs, and it would seem that funding never materialized (Goddard, 2012). Though this program approach does not specifically focus on gangs, and is instead a broader crime prevention model, it has been implemented in several communities in Canada, and could be revitalized focused on a gang violence prevention should the political will and funding machines of Public Safety Canada deem it a worthwhile model for funding. The Spergel Model There exists a well-known secondary intervention programs for gangs known as either the Spergel Model or the Comprehensive Gang Model, developed by Dr. Irving Spergel in the early 1990’s. The foundation of the Spergel Model is social disorganization theory. This theory assumes that gangs arise in communities that are not sufficiently coordinated or organized to prevent them. Based on this theory, the Spergel model assumes that solutions must involve the community. Because gangs are assumed to be the result of a specific set of community conditions, the necessary response includes a broad coalition of community players, including youth, residents, police, social services, community groups, and government agencies (Juhasz, 2019). The model serves as a framework in which communities have the necessary latitude to select the specific types of prevention, intervention, or suppression activities based on local strategic planning and research. According to Public Safety Canada (2018b), the Comprehensive Gang Model adheres to five core strategies: 275 1. Community mobilization – involving the community in responding to the gang problem. 2. Social intervention – addressing social deficits and issues, such as mental health issues, family dysfunction, substance abuse, and other factors that will diminish a gang member’s ability to disengage from the gang. 3. Opportunities provision – engaging gang members in educational and employment opportunities. 4. Gang suppression – reducing the ability of gangs to cause harm to the community. 5. Organizational change and development – improving the ability of organizations and agencies to respond to gangs. The original version of the Spergel model was piloted in the Little Village area of Chicago, which, at the time, was experiencing serious gang problems. Spergel (2006) served as both the coordinator and the evaluator in the pilot project that ran from 1992-1997 (which is obviously problematic, but those concerns are well beyond the focus here). The Little Village model included an interdisciplinary team composed of police, probation officers, street outreach workers, and former gang members who worked together to offer a wide range of individualized services to gang-involved youth, including referrals for employment and social assistance, crisis intervention, and grief counselling. Suppression activities included surveillance and arrests. Some of the research literature suggested that the most effective responses to gangs were comprehensive approaches that required multi-agency collaborations and incorporate prevention, intervention, and suppression approaches involving the community as a whole (Spergel, 1995). Spergel and Grossman (1997) stated that “no single agency, community group, discipline, or approach alone is sufficient to successfully address a complex problem such as gang crime” (p. 469). They concluded that best practices include implementing a broad-based response capable of providing young people with identified necessary support or developing alternatives aimed to address the multiple risk and protective factors. Principles that have guided comprehensive responses, include conducting research to understand the local context of gangs, neighbourhood-based responses, participation of a broad and diverse community coalition, organizational change and development, and implementing a diversity of responses based on local problem-solving. To implement the Spergel model, a steering committee must be established including the local police, social service organizations, and an interagency street team that includes youth outreach workers (Public Safety Canada, 2007). It is in this requirement that the Spergel model is difficult to implement as there must be sufficient buy-in, the project must be supported by key leaders, and participants must be willing to move past the existing tensions that often exist as a 276 result of the competing values that differ between partner organizations. Evaluations of the Spergel Model have suggested that because it is highly complex, requires significant and sustained coordination between agencies, and requires significant funding, that program drift and lack of fidelity are common implementation problems (Wong et al., 2012). Despite numerous challenges, evaluations of the Spergel model in Little Village demonstrated that gang-related crime, particularly arrests for violent and drug related offences were significantly reduced among program participants compared to youth in the comparison groups. Moreover, arrests for gang violence were reduced in the project area compared to six similar areas of the city. These results were considered promising at a time when there had been very limited success in reducing the violence and crime associated with gangs. The U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) tested the model in cities across five different states from 1995 — 2000, but found mixed results believed to result from low program fidelity, low participation from criminal justice agencies, and varying degrees of focus on suppression (Holder, Robinson & Slowikowski, 2010). Evaluations, also conducted by Dr. Spergel (again problematic), indicated some success in two cities in reducing crime and arrests for violent behavior relative to comparison sites. Three sites demonstrated no statistically significant difference in arrests between program and comparison youth. Spergel, Wa & Sosa (2006) concluded that poor implementation was responsible for the lack of significant differences in three sites, and acknowledged that none of the sites had implemented all of the model’s key components. The Spergel model continued to serve as the basic template for a series of adaptations and further developments by the OJJDP. The result has been various iterations of the model, the most recent of which was the Gang Reduction Program that placed more emphasis on prevention and post-incarceration re-integration supports. The Gang Reduction Program was implemented across four American cities between 2003 – 2008. Cahill and Hayeslip (2010) evaluated these programs and concluded that, despite various implementation challenges, including difficulties in cross-agency collaboration, insufficient time for planning, and staff turn-over, all sites managed to adapt the model to their specific gang problems and successfully implemented the complete model. Three sites demonstrated some evidence of reductions in gang-related violence and crime 277 levels, and all sites were successful in developing community partnerships to address gang issues. Gravel et al. (2013) stated that a comprehensive review of the Spergel Model in the Little Village Project prompted them to classify this program under gang activity prevention rather than suppression because of the limited involvement of police and the focus on counselling gang members, mediating conflicts, and gathering intelligence so as to prevent future gang violence (Gravel et al., 2013) Moreover, Wong et al. (2012) found the Spergel Model to be ineffective, mostly due to issues related to implementation fidelity. Despite concerns related to program fidelity, the Spergel model has been adapted and is called the ‘Gang Reduction Program’ in Canada. As previously discussed, the pitfall of the Spergel model is in its complexity, which renders it challenging to implement (Wong et al., 2012a). The ‘Pulling Levers’ Approach – Boston Ceasefire The work of Anthony Braga, David Kennedy, Elin Waring, and Anne Piehl, known as the ‘pulling levers’ strategy, involves “deterring violent behaviour by chronic gang offenders by reaching out directly to gangs, saying explicitly that violence would no longer be tolerated, and backing that message by 'pulling every lever' legally available when violence occurred” (Braga et al., 2001, p. 199). The theoretical foundation of this approach is that crime can be prevented when the offender perceives the costs to outweigh the benefits (Braga et al., 2001). When implemented, this approach known as ‘Operation Ceasefire’ falls primarily within this second philosophy of intervention, with some of the more directed police enforcement strategies falling into the third category of suppression. Core elements of the Ceasefire approach include the dissemination of a deterrence message throughout the community, followed by intentional moral engagement, offers to provide assistance for individuals willing to exit the gang, and the execution of swift, certain, and meaningful consequences for participating in violent activity (Kennedy, 2014). The ‘pulling levers’ strategies implemented through the Ceasefire program have received many positive evaluations of their effectiveness and have been tested in many cities (Braga et al., 2001; Braga 2015; Corsaro, Brunson, & McGarrell 2009; Wong et al., 2012). Combining the results from 10 evaluation studies, Braga and Weisburd (2012) found that focused deterrence 278 strategies were associated with an overall statistically significant, medium-sized crime reduction effect. The goal of focussed deterrence strategies is to strive for compliance rather than to proceed with criminal prosecution, hence its status as an intervention rather than suppression program. Examples of focussed deterrence include direct conversations with the most prolific offenders, providing them formal notice that they are of interest to law enforcement, that continued participation in violent behavior is likely to result in arrest and prosecution, and that wherever possible there will be lesser sanctions (such as curfews) imposed and that continued violent activity is likely to result in swift, certain and severe sanctions (Braga et al., 2008). Evaluations of the Ceasefire program have proven to be somewhat contradictory. The Ceasefire program was originally implemented in Boston, and evaluations there indicated that during the assessment period from 1991-1998, the program resulted in a 63% monthly decrease in youth homicides, a 32% decrease in the number of shots-fired calls reported monthly, and a 25% decrease in the number of assaults where a firearm was used (Braga et al., 2001). That said, replications of the Ceasefire model in Indianapolis and Los Angeles produced no evidence to demonstrate that efforts to disseminate a deterrence message had changed the behavior of gang members (Greene & Pranis, 2007). Greene and Pranis (2007) asserted that efforts to replicate both the Ceasefire models were met with limited success when transplanted into cities with very different demographics, geographies, and gang problems. This has important implications for both generalizability and policy transfer possibilities. Despite this, Wong et al. (2012) in their meta-analysis noted that the hands-on approach of the ‘pulling-levers’ strategy was the most consistently effective solution to reducing gang-related delinquency. They reasoned that perhaps this was because the strategy was implemented such that it allowed gang members to follow a fairly simple causal relationship: use a gun, and you and your associates will go to jail (Wong et al., 2012, p.29). The results of these program evaluation studies of the ‘pulling levers’ approach, suggested that focused deterrence strategies can reduce gang-related violence if the requisite swift, severe, and certain sanctions are available to police. In efforts to determine the potential applicability of the Boston Ceasefire Model in the Lower Mainland, Juhasz (2019) interviewed 12 police officers working across four police 279 jurisdictions including Abbotsford, Surrey, Vancouver, and members of CFSEU-BC. She noted three major themes: (1) practitioners perceived gangs to be very different in the Lower Mainland; (2) practitioners perceived the Canadian legal system as a hindrance to the ‘pulling-levers’ style of approaches popular in this model, though some promising avenues existed; and (3) in addition to enforcement, practitioners perceived prevention and intervention activities to be important elements of any gang strategy. In her findings, Juhasz noted the police officers in her research were unconvinced that such a strategy could be successful in the Lower Mainland because of the reliance on criminal charges, which are hampered by the charge approval process, and the minimal likelihood of achieving severe sanctions from the courts” (2019; p.119). Beyond this, Juhasz (2019) noted that there has been little empirical attention to specific processes, including a focus on the kinds of organizational change and development that supports positive outcomes (Juhasz, 2019). Similarly, there is scant research on the processes of the implementation and outcomes of prevention activities or the processes of community mobilization. Moreover, outcomes are reported in terms of crime data, which is a problematic measure, particularly in communities with relatively small gang-related crime and violence rates. Nevertheless, comprehensive community-based approaches continue to be seen as promising to address gang issues in communities (Juhasz, 2019). The three models described above are all examples of the ways in which police have engaged with the communities they serve in an attempt to address issues of violence. That said, on the whole, the evaluations of these programs all indicated troubling concerns related to funding, theoretical foundation, program fidelity, implementation drift, as well as a wide range of other methodological issues (Wong et al., 2012). In examining the literature, I was able to find one example of a Public Health Model implemented specifically to address gang violence, known as the Cure Violence program. 280 Cure Violence – Public Health Model Cure Violence59 is a public health approach to gun violence that seeks to create individual and community level changes to the social norms in communities where gun violence has become normalized (Butts, Roman, Bostwick, & Porter, 2015). Cure Violence (CV) was developed by physician Dr. Gary Slutkin at the University of Illinois at Chicago and relied on three key elements to stop the transmission of violent behavior; interrupting transmission directly, identifying and modifying the thinking of potential transmitters (those individuals at highest risk of perpetrating violence), and changing group norms regarding violence (Butts et al., 2015). The CV model operates independently from law enforcement, does not use the threat of punishment, and addresses concerns about community acceptability and social justice (Cerda, Tracy, & Keyes, 2018). The model employs two staff roles. The first role is the Violence Interrupter, who has prior experience with crime and violence, and is hired to establish relationships with those most at-risk of perpetrating violence, to monitor ongoing disputes, and to act as an intervener when imminent violence is likely, serving to ‘talk them down’ and encourage other methods of resolving the dispute (Butts et al., 2015). The second staff role is an Outreach Worker who is also expected to have prior contact with the criminal justice system and is tasked to develop trust with high-risk youth in the community. The role of the outreach worker is to connect high-risk individuals to prosocial and positive opportunities and resources in the community, including housing, employment, recreation, and education (Cerda et al., 2018). In the CV model, an outreach worker carries a caseload of up to 15 participants. Violence Interrupters and Outreach Workers work in teams along with supervisors and program directors meeting frequently to review interactions and conduct ongoing risk assessments. Beyond these efforts at individual-level behavior change, the teams under the CV model also work with neighborhood partners using various activities, including public events such as anti-violence marches, advertising signs and billboards, and media campaigns, in an effort to change social 59 Formerly known as the Chicago CeaseFire – a program that is fundamentally different than the Boston Ceasefire, which will be examined later in this chapter. The confusion prompted its renaming. 281 norms around and build a general consensus against violence (Butts et al., 2015). The Cure Violence model has been implemented in a number of US cities, including Chicago, Illinois; Baltimore, Maryland; Brooklyn, New York; Phoenix, Arizona; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Butts et al. (2015) reviewed the existing evaluations of these programs and found that credible evaluations of the CV model demonstrated significant effects in reducing gun violence in some intervention neighborhoods, but not in others. Their research highlighted the ongoing concerns related to the evaluation of these types of complex interventions arguing that few research designs were able to control for the types of factors that influenced violence. An evaluation that could withstand the criticisms related to confounding effects would require random assignment of several neighborhoods, which they argued was impractical and economically unfeasible, and would require implicit measurements of program fidelity throughout compounded by concerns of contamination in the control sites. As with most programs of change, ongoing and increasingly rigorous evaluation is necessary. Putting aside concerns related to experimental design, Butts et al. (2015) concluded that the community-level differences in programming effect could be attributed to the lack of program fidelity with the theoretical model. One of the key arguments expressed supporting the Cure Violence model was its cost effectiveness. Butts et al. (2015) argued that because there were no demands in the CV model placed on the police and criminal justice system, the program was less resource intensive and more cost-efficient. The caveat was that policymakers were believed to be more likely to invest in law enforcement than the CV Model of Public Health. This was the case not necessarily because enforcement was the best strategy for the problem, but because enforcement was a politically viable and known commodity. Public health frameworks, social services, and ‘non-traditional’ staff of former inmates and former gang members does not fit easily into traditional policy frameworks (Butts et al., 2015, p.52). Cerda et al. (2018) argued that the CV model was one of the most cost-effective community-based violence prevention models available. As with any programming, funding is key. Though prevention is cost-effective in the long run, it is expensive in the short-term, and these programs generally suffer from a lagged effect between implementation and the demonstration of program effects. That demonstration is only possible when appropriate and rigorous evaluation measures have been implemented. Without proof of efficacy, and in the absence of the political will necessary to 282 appropriately fund significant and sustained prevention efforts, communities and social services are faced with dealing with these issues after the fact in the expensive and arguably ineffective criminal justice system where enforcement-focused violence reduction approaches are the primary focus. These methods can generate immediate results, but are enormously cost prohibitive, require the continued coordination of complex bureaucracies, and, by their very nature, only address violence after it has happened. Without question, a successful public health model is expensive, but so is the criminal justice response. A consistent theme among all three organizations in considering the persistent gang violence across the Lower Mainland was the idea that police could not arrest their way out of this problem, from which the title of this thesis emerged. The literature suggests that a plausible way forward is community mobilization through public health; however, by all accounts the social welfare system, and accompanying safety net including resources for those experiencing addiction and mental illness are drastically under-resourced in British Columbia (CAMH, 2020; CMHA-BC, 2016; VPD, 2017). The literature suggests that an effective and adequately funded public health system that partners with police organizations has the potential to reduce the incidence of violence by improving social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental conditions in a community (Amobi et al., 2019; Butts et al., 2015; Cerda et al., 2018; Collier, 2017; Troisi, 2018; van Dikj et al., 2019; Welsh et al., 2014). An added benefit of incorporating policing into an appropriately resourced public health model is the emphasis on the necessity for rigorous evaluation of the things that police are doing. Moreover, the public health model is experienced in the robust evaluation measures required to demonstrate success, determining the potential for upscaling, and promoting successful policy transfer. However, if, given ongoing austerity measures, a collaborative police and public health model is not feasible, there must be an emphasis moving forward on the importance of evaluation, and careful attention must be paid to best practices in rigour. These include establishing an evaluation team from the outset, using quantitative measures, selecting from validated measurement and assessment tools, ensuring broad adoption of their use within the program, implementing strategic and accepted pre- and post-tests with a number of follow up points, using randomized assignment from the outset, or when this is not possible, creating a matched comparison sample. This emphasis on evaluation 283 ensures that police responses demonstrate efficacy, increase the potential for upscale across jurisdictions, and develop the necessary foundation for an evidence-based police response. 284 Conclusion Given the ongoing and persistent levels of gang violence in BC communities, the police have an important role to play as partners in prevention and intervention efforts, while maintaining exclusive responsibility for suppression efforts. That said, the longstanding and permeating community perception that the police are responsible for solving the gang issue in the Lower Mainland is fraught with problems related to resources, capacity, and responsibility. The police are funded to be reactive in nature and therefore policing budgets typically have very little funding specifically earmarked for prevention activities. Moreover, the police are trained first and foremost in their primary role as law enforcement officers, and therefore often lack the individual case management approach and perspective that has been traditionally housed in counselling and social work. Taken together, these concerns suggest that perhaps the police are not the right organization to be tasked with the development and implementation of gang prevention programming and intervention policy efforts. This dissertation asserted that the police are the policy actors tasked with developing and implementing prevention and intervention programming responses to the ongoing policy problems presented by persistent gang violence in Lower Mainland communities and are doing so in the absence of evidence. Ideally, best practices are based on knowledge derived from rigorous evaluations of interventions reported in peer-reviewed literature. However, many factors have complicated this approach to identifying best practices for gang violence prevention efforts. First, there are relatively few longitudinal and randomized-control studies. Second, while some studies have evaluated the outcome of interventions, they have not typically evaluated the effectiveness of individual implementation practices. Therefore, best practices remain somewhat elusive. Instead, police organizations rely on common practices or programs, learning from the anecdotal experiences of others. The conclusion then, is to proceed with caution, and in every possible instance, develop and implement evaluation measures at the forefront, as a matter of practice. The necessary emphasis on evaluation moving forward will ensure that police responses demonstrate efficacy, increase the potential for upscale across jurisdictions, and develop the necessary foundation for an evidence-based response. Across the Lower Mainland, police organizations have repeatedly and publicly iterated that ‘we are not going to be able to arrest our way out of this’. As such, the call moving forward 285 is to mobilize the provincial and federal governments to appropriately resource the social safety net through a public health model that provides the necessary community-based mental health and addictions support in an effort to reduce the demand for supply of illicit narcotics in BC, and improve overall wellness and quality of life. This recommendation is in keeping with those of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Crime Reduction (2014). That said, this recommendation is not prescriptive. Perhaps, as suggested by Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, the solution is in decriminalization of opiates (BC, 2019). An extensive consideration of that possibility is an important avenue of examination, but goes well beyond the purview of this research. Irrespective of the specific policies that are developed and implemented, a community mobilization effort is required, recognizing that the police alone cannot be responsible for the gang violence prevention and intervention efforts necessary to improve public safety and quality of life in communities across BC, and that in the absence of a reduction in demand for the supply of illicit narcotics, gang violence is likely to remain a persistent policy concern. Limitations and Future Research While the current study has offered several important findings, it has limitations. The findings of this study may not be representative of all police departments. Two of the three departments included in this study have recently undergone significant changes in their senior management teams and, therefore the attitudes, perceptions, and experiences of the 42 police officers and 2 civilians interviewed may have changed significantly since then. Whereas the officers in this study come in contact with enough gang-involved individuals to answer the research questions, officers from smaller or under-resourced departments may not have enough experience with or exposure to gang-involved individuals and gang violence. This study also encountered limitations with regard to sample size. While assembling the views of 44 employees of police organizations across three jurisdictions is a substantial empirical base for studies of this kind in Canada, it is not sufficient to generalise results to other departments across the province or the country. Moreover, the interviews were done two years ago, so it is possible that police perceptions have changed since that time. There remain outstanding questions about the ways in which issues related to racialization interact with police perceptions, and whether, or to what extent, this impacts their 286 response. As I noted in the methods chapter, the focus of this dissertation was not on race, and it is an area that I was uncomfortable pushing for clarity on, given the confines of the BREB certificate. When police officers indicated discomfort or did not want to respond to questions about the ethnic composition of lower mainland gangs, I accepted that, and moved on. Given the extensive literature focused on problematic police perceptions of racialized and minority communities in other areas of Canada, this is an important area of future research, and should be done by someone who is well-versed in critical race theory. The caveat here is that given issues related to access, organizational approval, and ethical concerns that arise when a participant indicates a desire to skip a given question, research on this important issue is decidedly hard to do. Indeed, there is irony in the fact that this dissertation offers almost none of the methodological rigor it purports as best practice. This is the nature of exploratory research. In 2016, when this research came to fruition, there existed very little publicly available information on police prevention, intervention, and suppression responses in the Lower Mainland. This reality has only minimally improved since that time. As such, the effort here was to assemble the anecdotal. By positioning the police as policy actors and developing a comprehensive collection of the various policy responses that have been implemented in the past 15 years, this dissertation provides an overview of police perceptions, and why this matters to policy development. The hope is that this research offers the empirical foundation for future research. Many studies have examined gangs in Canada, but few have examined police perceptions of the issue or considered the significance of these perceptions as policy actors responsible for devising and implementing prevention, intervention, and suppression programs. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Geography
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
“We can’t arrest our way out of this” police responses to gang violence in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland
Text