Gang members are made, not born, says Peary, the Abbotsford mayor, and a lot of little things can make a difference. He wants to reinstitute uniformed police school liaison officers and foster alternate education programs. Even a hot breakfast program for primary school children can save a child from falling behind, becoming alienated and seeking belonging in gang life, he says. Winnipeg, home to some of the country’s hardest street gangs, has launched a multi-pronged series of diversion programs. Among them is SPIN (Sports Programs in Inner-City Neighbourhoods). The program removes such barriers to inner-city sports programs as financing, transportation, coaching and volunteers, says Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz. “We took those away and provided a healthy and positive environment for children in the community we believe would be at risk of joining gangs to feel accepted.”
In Toronto, police have a series of outreach programs in at-risk areas and announced the posting of 30 uniformed officers in area high schools. And the department hires, with provincial funding, students from “priority neighbourhoods” for a variety of jobs. Many had never met the police before, at least on good terms, says spokesman Mark Pugash. “We now have people who have worked with us for three months who want to become police officers,” he says. In Montreal, Projet Espoir (Project Hope) is spearheaded by Lionel Anglade, a Haitian-born Montreal police officer and boxer who runs a boxing program for kids susceptible to gangs.
Such long-term thinking is all too rare for politicians who rarely look beyond the next election, says Chettleburgh. “We need to be keeping them engaged in pro-social activities because [if] the kid doesn’t have a connection to traditional society, whether that’s school, sports and recreation or family, he’s going to become socialized on the street.”
If anything good comes of the mad spiral of gang violence in Vancouver, it’s the realization “that it affects us all,” says Chettleburgh. “This is not just the gangster community that is dying.” All Stephen Harper had to do to appreciate that last Thursday was look to his right, into the face of Eileen Mohan.
Weeks earlier she’d talked to Maclean’s about what it is like for her and her husband Sunil to open the door to an empty home, one that used to be filled with music, laughter, running shoes and all the great pieces of their son’s life. She seems tired, and ever more frail, and yet she is everywhere these days, at rallies, public forums and at the Prime Minister’s side. She runs on faith, determined, as Harper said in another context, not to waste this crisis. There are laws to be changed, and parents to be made accountable, and rights of victims and victimizers to be rebalanced.
She speaks regularly with the homicide team investigating the murder of her son, who died because he stepped into his apartment hallway, apparently on the way to play basketball. Progress, they tell her, is “steady, but slow.” She tries to be patient. She knows the challenges they face, and that it will be these men and women—more than new laws or politicians or speeches—who will deliver what measure of justice she can hope for in this life. “When you’re a parent who has lost a beautiful son you want to believe in something,” she says. “I want to believe in them, because I’ve lost believing in anything else.”
With Nancy Macdonald, John Geddes, Nicholas Köhler, Martin Patriquin, Patricia Treble, and Susan Mohammad.
