Officials offer strategies to stem gun violence
A pair of councillors and the city’s public safety director give their two cents
Last year, 13 people were slain in Surrey. Five months into 2018, Surrey has had its sixth homicide of the year, with 22 cases of shots fired — despite considerable investments in anti-gang programs.
Gun violence in the area was put under the microscope this week after the bodies of two teenage boys — shot dead — were found lying on a dirt road after what police believe was a targeted hit.
We asked two leading mayoral candidates and the city’s public safety director what can be done.
The interviews have been edited for clarity and length.
What have you done to work on this issue in your time as councillor?
The big thing that happened in the last little while, is that there has been an increased investment in policing and police officers, in the last term particularly.
The one thing that we have done that is uniquely different is this gang task force that has a tremendous amount of community partners.
Is it working ?
I don’t believe that, at a federal, provincial and municipal level, there’s a collective thinking.
That’s because of the mass of different entities. … All these different bodies are failing to work as a co-operative. If you look at the system in total, the money is there. But we’re not moving that money from the incarceration side to proactive side.
What else can be done and by whom?
We really do truly understand that the issue that impacts our youth starts at a relatively young age.
Some of these young individuals are very impressionable. Much of the resources being spent on the individuals are being spent when they’re much older.
One needs to understand that to be able to catch the issue and address it, we need to be there and get there quicker to get there at the appropriate age. The element of age, and getting to these kids at grade 5 and 6, is just as important of getting to them at grade 10, 11 and 12.
What have you done to work on this issue in your time as councillor?
We’ve worked on a mayoral task force on violence that’s going to come out with solutions. It involves the police chief, school liaisons, among others. Shortly after the last election as a result of commitments, we hired 100 new RCMP officers in Surrey. It took a while for them to fill all of those positions, but they did fill them as needed.
Is it working ?
Over the past few years, the number of shots fired has decreased, but it’s still unacceptably high. There’s still work to be done, and we’ve hired a public safety officer and developed a whole department around that to further work on it, with a specific emphasis on gangs and guns in the younger communities.
What else can be done and by whom?
There are clearly too many handguns on our streets. That’s something we can specifically work on with the CBSA and the port authorities to try to tighten up the importation of firearms into Canada. We need to work with the solicitor general’s office to implore them to keep charged known gang members in pretrial and not let them out before trials occur. And we need to speed up those trials. We need to put more resources in our judicial system to keep dangerous offenders in pretrial before trial and send a message that this is simply not tolerated in our society.
What have you done to work on this issue in your time as director?
In the public-safety department, we have created a publicsafety strategy which brings together several dozen different programs to ensure that we deal with all aspects of prevention and intervention. So we’ve developed and strengthened programs related to at-risk youth, we’ve developed additional programs, including some neighbourhood specific programs too.
Is it working ?
They’ve definitely increased the opportunities for youth to be more involved in their community and appropriate types of programming.
We’ve also noticed a lot more collaboration among different service providers, so we’re more co-ordinated to ensure that all the varying needs of youth are met.
We’re definitely having an impact. One of the realities of prevention is that it never eliminates the situation. You can certainly make it better for certain youth, but it doesn’t all just go away. We continue to be concerned that whenever there’s a tragic incident that impacts a young person, that we try to understand and respond accordingly.
What else can be done and by whom?
The mayor, through this year, has led a very significant task force on gang violence prevention. We’ve just finished up that report and will be releasing it in June.
We’re working with the province and the federal government to develop new programs so that we can use the recently allocated funding to make the situation even better in terms of what we offer.
It’s about more community involvement and the need for all three levels of government to be involved, and recognize that this is a regional issue. All three levels of governments need to work together, and we’ll be responding accordingly with the task force recommendations.