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 ten 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.
