Turning up the pressure

In fact, what was unveiled is not really new -- anti-gang cops will return to the basics of fighting gang crime, drawing up a list of the top 50 gang and violent offenders and putting them under intense surveillance. The stepped-up scrutiny will allow police to capitalize on any infractions they make, such as while driving, and monitoring those released on bail or from jail will ensure compliance with conditions of release, snagging those who go astray.

The strategy is sound -- too often those who arrested for serious crimes are found to have been on conditional release or running from a date with a judge. Attorney General Dave Chomiak announced there will be additional provincial money spent to hire support personnel to manage a data base of known gang thugs, which permits police to better co-ordinate their efforts with other justice programs.

The decision to identify top offenders of gang violence borrows a tack first tried in Winnipeg's anti-auto theft strategy. In this project, various justice programs worked with Winnipeg police and MPI, going at young car thieves from a number of angles to keep track of and work with those youth who posed greatest risk to reoffend.

Proponents point to the success of that program as a predictor of success in gang-suppression. But that seems overly optimistic. The anti-car theft program, over many years, leaned heavily on a plethora of programs from a variety of government departments that diverted youth away from crime, back to school and off the streets in the middle of the night. Ankle bracelets helped keep track of repeat offenders while probation workers supervised their daily routines.

That is not so easily transposed onto inveterate gang members, many of whom are beyond rehabilitation. That criminal element fuels street violence, recruiting and arming wannabes from the North End and inner-city neighbourhoods where kids, desperate for status, identity and easy money find a misguided sense of pride in street gangs.

The intense enforcement and surveillance will help keep the most dangerous of gang members under pressure. As well, it will get some of them, breaching court orders or arrest warrants, behind bars and may even prevent some crime, an enormously difficult task. But social justice advocates and those who have studied the roots of crime, particularly of street gangs, are justified in noting that locking up one thug simply opens opportunity for his rival.

The drug trade, and its reliance upon addiction, has proven resilient to billions of dollars worth of cross-government, multi-national effort. But ramping up the pressure on gang members will frustrate that trade, and the violence that accompanies it; citizens rightly expect criminals to be behind bars and that the law make it really tough for them to do business.

As with the car-theft problem, though, the provincial government cannot hope to suppress gang violence if it does not work as intensely to cut off the easy supply of recruits. That is done by improving the lives of kids who are ripe for gang pickings -- kids, in dysfunctional or impoverished families, who start school already behind, who live in decrepit housing and are constantly on the move, and who see no future except in the misguided but tantalizing promise of easy money.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 26, 2009 A18