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Vancouver gang violence |
Article Submitted by: Jay Banks
Friday, 03 July 2009
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Vancouver is facing lot of negative news lately - why? For the first three months of 2009 only, Vancouver (2.7 mil inhabitants) has witnessed 45 shootings, 17 of them fatal. Recalculated per 1 mil citizens, it makes 6.3 persons dying a violent death. In comparison, Toronto has 5.1 mil citizens and for the same 3 months, only 11 murders occurred, resulting in almost three times smaller number - 2.2 people dying violently out of every 1 million. Double war: gangs fight gangs, gangs fight the police 10 years ago, there were only 10 times less active gangs in Vancouver than now. This means that nowadays, there are more than 100 groups functioning in Vancouver! Moreover, there are three main factors that are not helping the situation at all: 1) the gangs' organization is mostly quite bad, 2) they can acquire weapons without any remarkable effort, and 3) the member base of the gangs is formed of very young draftees. Today, we can notice a parallel fight in Vancouver and its streets. One of them being of course between the gangs themselves. This war originated from the fact that the price of Mexican cocaine has been rising. Recently, the Mexican government has gone through a massive counter cartel activity procedure, which drove the cost of cocaine up from $23,300/kg to almost $39,000/kg. Now you might be asking why the bond between Vancouver and drugs is so intense. Well, the configuration of the city's relaxed approach, geographical location and immense backcountry result in the perfect configuration for enhanced drug crime. We could hardly find another Canadian city with such perfect configuration of these factors. And yet the city of Vancouver has less officers per head of population than any other big Canadian city. On the top of that the regional government plans on cutting the police and court annual expenses by $20 million by 2012. If the metropolitan police had more financial and personal resources in hand, their situation in the fight against the gangs would be much better. What to do now? For my Vancouver BC RE business is necessary to present safe and peaceful places for living. It is impossible to suggest some easy instant solution for the current state of things. But just using my common sense, I think that taking money and other resources from the police, while they are in need of even more, is not a good idea at all. Safety and security have to become the city's important traits again. One, but not the only reason being the Olympic games next year, but mostly because the people of Vancouver deserve it. Proposing new strict law by the PM Stephen Harper - labelling gang killings as first-degree murder with a punishment of at least 25 years, is definitely a step to the right direction, but much more has to be done for the city to become what it used to be. Article Source: http://www.ArticleBlast.com |
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