The rise of Vancouver’s deadly gang war
Homicide rate rising to levels not seen in years
The Vancouver shooting death of an innocent teenage boy caught in the crossfire of a drug gang shootout has revived fears of gang war in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.
“We are targeting gangs as we speak,” said Adam Palmer, chief of the Vancouver Police Department, as he announced the death of two people, including one of the gunmen, in a wild shootout just after 9 p.m. on a busy city street last Saturday.
The deaths come as Vancouver’s annual homicide rate is rising to levels not seen in the nearly 10 years since the major gang war that pitted the Red Scorpions gang, in alliance with the arch-criminal Bacon brothers, against the established United Nations gang, in a fight for the drug trade.
As an organized crime conflict that spilled out onto public streets and threatened the lives of innocent Canadians, that war was rivalled only by the Montreal biker turf wars of the late 1990s between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine, and the more recent conflict between the Malvern Crew and Galloway Boys in Toronto.
As ever, the battleground shifts just as much as the players. In Vancouver, those players include established gangs like the Independent Soldiers, as well as outlaw motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels, and other ethnic based crime syndicates. But they also increasingly include other actors, sometimes with far greater criminal scope.
There is, for example, increasingly interplay with Mexican cartels, some of which have even sent representatives to Canada to monitor their interests, including money laundering and drugs.
There are also allegiances and feuds with various Alberta gangs.
It is not clear how the Saturday night shootout might fit into those broader gangland dynamics, but that is a focus of investigators. The Vancouver Police Department has put more than 50 officers on the case, supported by the anti-gang Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit.
One of the people killed Saturday night was a gangster, Kevin Whiteside, 23, who was known to police. He participated in the shootout at a busy intersection, Palmer said, and died after being shot. The other shooter or shooters managed to escape.
The Vancouver Sun reported Whiteside was under a lifetime firearms ban with convictions for assault with a weapon, possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking, break and enter. It cited sources identifying him as a “fairly low-level” drug dealer in the notorious Downtown Eastside.
The other, “a young, innocent, 15-year-old boy from Coquitlam,” as Palmer described him, was identified as Alfred Wong, a member of a Christian church, and a student at Pinetree Secondary School, who swam and worked as a lifeguard. A friend remembered him in a web posting as a “strong, smart, and loyal person.”
A third man was also injured and treated at the scene. His face was grazed by a bullet that left a hole in the headrest of the car in which he was a passenger. The driver’s side rear window also had a bullet hole through it.
Ralph, as he identified himself to media, said he saw a shooter on one side of the car, and there were holes in the other, meaning he had been directly in the crossfire.
Police have recently warned the general public about the danger posed by specific gang members, often because the members are at constant risk of assassination in drive-by shootings that can kill bystanders.
In late December, for example, Gavinder Grewal, 30, was killed in a targeted hit in North Vancouver. He had been facing trial on a manslaughter charge, due to begin this week.
Months previously, police warned the public about Grewal’s brothers, saying they lived a “criminal lifestyle that includes violence, drugs and weapons,” and they pose a risk of “significant harm” to anyone who associates with them.”
“Our message to gangs, and it’s a similar message that we’ve had in Vancouver for a long time, is that we go after gangs aggressively in Vancouver,” Palmer said. “That has been our focus for many years. We are targeting gangs as we speak and there’s been several major projects just in the last couple of months that we’ve reported to you where we’ve arrested gang members with firearms and fentanyl and for all kinds of violent offences and we’re continuing to target gang members and when they engage in this type of activity in the city we’re going to come after them aggressively.”
OUR MESSAGE TO GANGS ... IS THAT WE GO AFTER GANGS AGGRESSIVELY IN VANCOUVER.