Vancouver Police photo
One dad actually told an officer that “kids are being kids.”
And then all of a sudden the parents find their kid is in hospital.
Or that he is dead!
BY RATTAN MALL
ARE dads going to wake up to the fact that their sons are involved in gang and other criminal activities or that their daughters are hanging out with these kind of guys only when B.C.’s Civil Forfeiture Office goes to court to claim their vehicle?
Or when their kids land up in hospital – or even dead?
Those are questions that sincere South Asian police officers want to put to them because the situation is still pretty dicey from Vancouver’s South Slope to Abbotsford.
Just last week, I reported that the Director of B.C. Civil Forfeiture has gone to court to claim two vehicles that were allegedly used in a shootout in which Harwindip Singh Baringh, 18, was killed in Abbotsford last October, and also that the incident was allegedly a clash between two South Asian crime groups.
I also reported that sources told me that the conflict is an extension of the one going on in Vancouver’s South Slope – one that I have been reporting on extensively since last February when I warned the community in an article titled: “Is South Slope of Vancouver headed back to notorious days of Bindy Johal versus Dosanjh brothers type of rivalry?”
One officer told me: “In south Vancouver these kids are driving around with machetes in their cars, with masks, with knives, with baseball bats and they are driving around in their parents’ cars and they are chasing each other around; they are looking for each other.”
So here are some questions parents need to ask themselves and not just naively believe that their kids aren’t doing anything wrong:
Do you know what your kids are doing? Do you know who they (both sons and daughters) are hanging out with? Do you know where they are going? Do you know if your kid is using drugs? Do you know if your kid is selling drugs (because this is what is happening out there)? Do I know who my daughter is taking the car to?
Why?
Read on …
FIRST of all, let me deal with the gang connections of the young South Asian males in Abbotsford and Vancouver’s South Slope. As I mentioned earlier, October’s murder of Baringh was allegedly a clash between two South Asian crime groups, according to court documents.
I will avoid mentioning any names of the crime groups as these last names are very common in the community and may unfairly tarnish the reputations of those families.
One crime group that has been very active in South Slope and which is being closely monitored by the police is very close to one of the Abbotsford crime groups involved in October’s Abbotsford shootout.
“Those two families have a direct link between Vancouver and Abbotsford and even Surrey. They run their drug operations and criminal activities,” a source told The VOICE.
And just like there are these two opposing South Asian crime groups in Abbotsford, the highly active crime group in Vancouver mentioned above has another South Asian crime group opposing them in South Slope.
“In each area there’s a group against the other and they are connected to a group in the other area,” the source noted.
The group opposed to the highly active one on South Slope is more discreet, avoiding the media spotlight.
What’s happening now in Abbotsford is what’s been happening for the past three years in South Slope.
But the media attention that they got in The VOICE over the past year has made them cool it because they are afraid of their names being revealed and the police coming after them.
“They are still active, but they are keeping away from violence so as not to get media attention and have problems with that,” revealed a source.
RECRUITMENT of school-going kids to sell drugs is still going on, especially as members of a powerful crime group are out of jail, “but now they need to find people on the street to sell their drugs because they don’t want to go back to jail,” a source told me.
So contact is made with cousins and friends in the 22-24-age group who in turn call friends who are in Grade 12 and they find someone who is willing to sell drugs at the school, and then that person finds someone else and so on.
The recruitment starts as early as Grade 8. The recruiters could be in Grades 10, 11 or 12 or they could be recent graduates who have friends who are in Grade 10, 11 and 12 who are helping them. Most of them could be around 16-17 years old and they have a friend or a brother or some other relative who’s a few years older, say 18-19, who’s telling them how to do the recruitment.
That is something that the parents and the community need to know – that in South Slope the kids are being asked to start selling drugs at schools, and they are buying drugs.
You’ve got kids that are coming from good families. Their parents work hard and they give their kids whatever they want. But they don’t know what their kids are doing and where they are going.
Some kids in Vancouver start off selling marijuana at school and then all of a sudden they’ve got to carry bear spray on them, then a knife and finally they get involved with their little crew. Then somebody tells them ‘you owe me a hundred dollars because I gave you this much weed and you didn’t sell it’ or they get caught at school with the weed and now they owe somebody a hundred dollars.
So then they have to get some more drugs and are told ‘you sell this, but you don’t get any money, we want all the money back.’ That’s how they are getting recruited because they are getting stuck with debt.
Then the kids get involved in groups that do street robberies where a kid is walking home from school and they just surround him, beat him with a baton, pepper spray him, take his jacket, take his phone and so on.
The kids are also showing up at other schools in their parents’ cars, selling drugs and trying to attract girls.
PARENTS need to be more responsible.
For example, they need to check if their kids have weapons in their rooms, who their kids are hanging out with and why they are going out at odd hours and asking them for money.
When their kids get into trouble and their $80,000 car gets seized by the government, they want their vehicle back, but they don’t want to discipline their kids.
“There needs to be accountability and it has to come from the parents,” an officer told me. “Their parents don’t pay attention to them. They are too busy working or thinking nothing is going to go wrong with their kids.”
When police approach the parents, some get it, but unfortunately some others don’t. There are cases where the mom gets it and wants to help her kid, but the dad is the boss and the mom feels too intimidated to intervene.
One dad actually told an officer that “kids are being kids.”
And then all of a sudden the parents find their kid is in hospital.
Or that he is dead!
