Daily BrewAbbotsford, B.C.'s journey back from being Canada's gang-murder capital
It’s been years since Abbotsford, about an hour’s drive east of Vancouver, became Canada’s gang-murder capital, but the label has been hard to shake.
A CBC News report on the country’s gang hotspots still singles out the Fraser Valley city of 133,000, and adjacent Mission, as the country’s No. 1 municipality for gang murders, based on Statistics Canada data from 2003 to 2012. It had 1.02 gang-related killings per 100,000 people, doubling the rate for most other Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) its size.
The CBC News report does point out that the figure is skewed somewhat by the 11 gang murders committed in 2009 at the height of a gang war that raged across the Lower Mainland in 2008-09. Dozens were killed as the Abbotsford-based Bacon brothers’ Red Scorpions battled with the United Nations gang for control of the lucrative marijuana trade.
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The city’s reputation is probably unfair today, though Abbotsford police spokesman Const. Ian MacDonald won’t go as far as to say the problem of gang violence is gone.
“I would say somewhat cautiously that the situation has improved,” he said Monday in an interview with Yahoo Canada News. “At the end of the day, you’re dealing with a volatile group. We know there is still money to be made.”
The Bacons are gone, either dead or in jail, and many of their Red Scorpion associates have been hit. And the UN Gang is not the power it once was, with founder Clayton Roueche rotting in a U.S. prison.
The Hells Angels have reasserted control of the region’s drug trade and have largely tamped down bloodier turf battles. Bad for business.
In some cases, according to Simon Fraser University criminologist Rob Gordon, police in B.C. have even called on the infamous biker gang to calm things down.
"You had an unusual arrangement where some of the Hells Angels members were enlisted to assist the police with a particular problem," he said.
Roots of Abbotsford’s gang problem
To understand what happened in Abbotsford, you have to go back a decade or more to the explosion of marijuana production in the Vancouver area, said MacDonald.
"The main cash cow for organized crime was marijuana grow-ops," he said.
Abbotsford was ideally situated. The sprawling municipality was close to Metro Vancouver and to the U.S. border. It was bisected by the Trans-Canada Highway and policed by roughly 200 officers. There was a lot of money to be made. A lot.
“From a criminal standpoint, it’s not far enough away that it would prevent you from growing your crop here, say 10 years ago, and moving that commodity across the border or westbound down the freeway,” said MacDonald.
The semi-rural region offered plenty of places to hide sizable grow-ops in containers buried underground or in converted barns, said Sgt. Lindsay Houghton, spokesman for B.C.’s Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, which spearheads anti-gang operations.
"It’s not densely populated like Vancouver or even Surrey, so there’s a lot of open space," he said.
The cash bonanza drew in young men, not from poverty-stricken ghettos but from comfortable, middle-class neighbourhoods.
“Here in B.C., we have this middle-class thug wannabe-gangster problem, where you’ve got these kids who seemingly have every opportunity,” said Houghton. “It’s the lure of one thing and one thing only, and that’s money.”
As the turf battle grew more deadly, Abbotsford’s police force had to reorient itself to face what previously was only seen as a big-city problem.
It created a gang-suppression unit in 2010, but even before that, civic leaders sounded the alarm about the drug trade’s deepening economic roots. Local businesses were asked to weigh the money they were making from free-spending, hard-partying young men in expensive cars against the possibility their establishments might become shooting galleries.
“That was one of our objectives, to make Abbotsford an absolutely lousy place to be a gangster,” said MacDonald. ”Two hundred and twenty cops can’t do that themselves.”
At the same time, police mounted a public-awareness effort to make gang life less attractive to would-be recruits, talking to thousands of students in local schools and elsewhere. They also encouraged gang members to consider quitting with tactics like sending them "Christmas cards" showing Abbotsford Police Chief Bob Rich dressed as Santa, wearing police tactical gear and toting an assault rifle.
"Which list will you be on?" read the card’s greeting.
The gang-related death rate certainly has gone down, from a max of eight in 2009 (out of 11 total homicides) to one the following year and none in 2011. There was one gang-linked murder (out of three total) in 2012 and another (out of two) in 2013, and two gang-related killings last year.
The B.C.-wide gang homicide rate increased in 2013, according to StatsCan, as well as in Manitoba, while the national average rate of 0.27 per 100,000 population is the lowest it’s been since 2004. However, Houghton said the seven homicides in 2014 were an all-time low.
Factors in declining gang violence
Abbotsford’s anti-gang campaign undoubtedly has had an impact but so have other factors. Some senior gangsters, tired of having targets on their backs or being hounded by police, have simply left for greener pastures.
“You’ve got a lot of high-profile people who are the targets of violence leaving B.C. and that has an effect as well on what happens on the streets,” said Houghton.
For years, Lower Mainland gangs have been moving to new territories, spanning from rural B.C. to Manitoba. They easily muscle out local drug dealers and take over the drug trade in places like Alberta, where energy workers have plenty of cash to blow, said Houghton.
For instance, the 856 Gang, which originated in the Vancouver suburb of Aldergrove, has shown up in Yellowknife, N.W.T.
While Vancouver-area media regularly report shootings, most seem related to the street-level drug trade, not a larger turf war. Houghton said the that fact two gangsters, including Red Scorpions co-founder Michael Le, testified for the Crown at the trial of the men eventually convicted in the so-called Surrey Six murder case, has also spooked some gangsters.
Changing economics is also a factor, said SFU’s Rob Gordon.
Pot producers have moved a lot of their grow operations out of the Fraser Valley to the B.C. Interior, along the main supply corridor to northeastern B.C. and the Alberta oil sands.
"They’re still doing a brisk business," said Gordon.
The terrain of the illicit pot business is also changing with legalization of marijuana in Washington state and Colorado, and the possibility of Canadian legalization still looms large. Some growers have moved across the border and others are repositioning to take advantage of future legitimate opportunities here.
"This is the beginning of the end of the illegal marijuana industry," Gordon predicted.
