New police unit to investigate Lower Mainland gang killings

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The British Columbia government is creating a new police unit to investigate gang killings in the Lower Mainland.

The gang homicide squad will operate within the RCMP-led Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, British Columbia’s Ministry of Public Safety announced Thursday.

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The new IHIT unit, which will be operational in late 2024 or early 2025, will have 18 positions, including 12 police officers and civilian staff members hired by the BC Organized Crime Agency. The other six positions will be officers transferred from BC’s anti-gang squad. Special Execution Unit of the Armed Forces.

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IHIT currently employs 115 people, including 80 police officers and 35 support staff.

“This is a top priority for our government,” Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth said in a statement Thursday. “We continue to work alongside our law enforcement partners to curb gang violence, and the development of this team is an important step forward in this collective responsibility.”

A specialized gang homicide unit was one of the recommendations of a report obtained by Postmedia last fall that criticized CFSEU, B.C.’s only anti-gang agency.

He said CFSEU ​​had no responsibility to investigate gang murders, although it had worked over the years with IHIT on successful investigations such as the investigation into the murder of the Surrey Six in 2007, the murder of Red Scorpion Kevin LeClair in 2009 and the murder in Kelowna of fellow Scorpion, Jonathan in 2011. Bacon. All resulted in convictions against members of the Red Scorpion gangs and the United Nations.

“Formalizing gang homicide investigation responsibility for CFSEU ​​and developing the necessary capacity may benefit the implementation of a more viable gang suppression strategy in British Columbia,” the report says.

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Wayne Rideout, a former top RCMP official who retired as British Columbia’s deputy deputy minister and director of police services last year, previously told Postmedia that he had requested the CFSEU ​​review because “he was very concerned about the escalation of violence that was occurring in our communities caused by these gangsters. He needed guarantees that there were demonstrable results.”

Rideout said Thursday that the government’s announcement about the new gang killer team was “really fantastic news.”

“It complements what’s already in IHIT and allows what’s in IHIT to focus on chronic homicides as well as unsolved homicides, and then creates some capacity to work on more complex gang cases,” said Rideout, who led IHIT when it was first formed. in 2003.

“In my opinion, one of the strategies to dismantle and combat gangs is to investigate and solve gang murders and imprison those responsible with 25-year murder sentences,” Rideout said. “In addition to solving gruesome murders, it is a solid strategy for disrupting and destabilizing gangs.”

Rideout said that once the unit, formally called the integrated gang homicide team, is operational, “the next step is to monitor performance to ensure that this strategy is actually achieving results.”

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The percentage of gang-related murders has steadily increased in British Columbia from 21 per cent in 2003 to 46 per cent last year.

Superintendent Mandeep Mooker, director of IHIT, said in a statement Thursday that “as the gang landscape evolves, so must our approach to keeping Canadians safe.”

“For more than 20 years, we have used an integrated policing approach, successfully investigating and prosecuting those responsible for the most heinous crimes, including members of organized crime groups who have time and again neglected public safety in pursuit of their own agendas. personal,” Mooker said. saying.

As of December 2023, IHIT had 356 unsolved homicides. Neither Vancouver Police nor Delta Police are part of IHIT, although other Lower Mainland municipal forces and RCMP detachments are.

The new unit is expected to free up IHIT resources, so officers can address some of their backlog of unsolved murders.

Funding for the new unit will come from a federal government anti-gang program that provided BC with $10.9 million for the 2023-24 fiscal year. The government did not give an exact dollar figure, although the new unit will be funded by the $4.25 million federal grant BC allocated to the Organized Crime Agency, while the six officers transferred from the CFSEU ​​will be paid from the CFSEU ​​budget.

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