Markham Hislop

Constable Al Devolin and I share a laugh early in the interview.  After a few minutes listening to him describe the efforts of his four-man unit to keep kids out of gangs, I remark that his work is like bailing the Titanic with a thimble.  He chuckles.  Cst. Devolin strikes me as an easy going guy.  A good thing, given the stress he and his colleagues face every day.

What do we do about gangs?  Cst. Devolin wrestles this question every day.

The gangs that run the Calgary drug trade and brazenly shoot their rivals in public are the major leagues and they have created a minor league system to groom new members.  Cst. Devolin works in the trenches trying to keep kids out of that system. 

Kids and gangs are his specialty. 

The first thing he does is disabuse me of the notion that gang membership and activity is confined to one area of Calgary, the northeast, say, or downtown.  The same goes for the socio-economic status of gang members.

He recalls sitting in the living room of a swanky southeast home talking to the anxious parents of a kid associated with gang activity.  The parents were well educated, upper middle class and involved in their child’s life.  Good parents by most people’s standards.  Yet their child had put a tentative foot on the slippery slope that leads to gang membership, drug use, crime, violence and, too often, an early death.  As he looked out the big bay window at the beautiful snow-capped mountains off in the distance, he must have wondered why the young man in question would jeopardize such a comfortable life for a perilous existence in a gang. 

That is the big question: why do kids join gangs? 

Cst. Devolin stresses there are as many reasons kids join gangs as there are kids.  He points me toward the growing body of literature on the topic.  There is plenty on gangs in the United States, but relatively little Canadian research.  For better or worse, we have come late to the game. 

No surprise, most gang members come from bad neighborhoods, broken or dysfunctional homes, immigrant families that never integrated into the community, abusive parental relationships and plenty have a family member already in the life.  Stories about aboriginal gang kids are particularly heartbreaking; life at home is so bad that drug use, violence, prison and constant fear of death still constitute an upgrade in lifestyle.  These are the kids that show up most frequently in the literature.

Gangs are family to these kids.  They now belong to a clan, a tribe.  Other kids give them begrudging respect, but respect nonetheless.  Even within the violent gang culture there is a certain safety – or at least they feel safer.  Girls like them.  Suddenly there is money for clothes, drugs, lots of partying, jewelry, maybe a car.  They are somebody.

Cst. Devolin’s kids tell similar stories.  “There is no one pathway a young person takes into gang life.  Each young person that we deal with has gone into that lifestyle for one or a number of reasons.  It looks different for every kid,” he says.

But then he casually tosses off a remark that catches my attention.  “There is the perception they are going to get rich,” he says. 

The expectation of financial gain.  This aspect of gang life gets less attention than you might imagine in the gang literature.  My impression, based on admittedly limited reading, is that experts agree the drug trade and gang crime is highly profitable, but no one really knows just how profitable or how those profits are divvied up. 

However, in a separate interview, available on SECN as a podcast, gang expert Michael Chettleburgh said gang members could make tens of thousands of dollars a month in the drug trade.  Calgary gang unit staff sergeant Gavin Walker has said that many gang foot soldiers earn only a modest living peddling drugs, but they live with the expectation that one day they will graduate to the big money.

Perhaps we need more economists writing about gangs and fewer social scientists.  I suspect if we looked at gang life as a business case, instead of a social problem or a law enforcement crisis, it would look like an Economics 101 lecture: all about the law of supply and demand. 

The demand side of the equation doesn’t get much attention apart from salacious tabloid stories about the latest drug-addled celebrity trotted off to rehab.  Mr. Chettleburgh claims that a hundred years ago 1.3 per cent of Canadians were addicted to alcohol and drugs and exactly the same percentage is addicted today. 

Perhaps the search for euphoria is an inescapable part of the human experience and addiction is the price some pay for that quixotic journey.  Or maybe addiction is how the mentally ill anesthetize the pain. 

Look for SECN stories on the demand side of the drug trade in the coming weeks.

Over on the supply side, Cst. Devolin has his hands full.

Gangs exist to sell drugs.  They may run guns or pimp prostitutes, but the big money is in drugs.  As SECN reported last month, Calgary Police routinely bust sophisticated marijuana grow operations whose plants have a street value in excess of $3 million.  The cocaine trade is even bigger, though police aren’t sure how much bigger and are loath to speculate.

The criminal organizations that smuggle and sell illicit narcotics in Calgary are sophisticated, well-funded and very often transnational.  That means the Calgary gangs, like the Fresh Off the Boat or the Fresh Off the Boat Killers, are just the tip of the iceberg.  There is an organizational structure in place that will survive any police attempts to eradicate it.  The Calgary Sun quotes Cathy Prowse, a former Calgary Police officer, saying, “Players come and go, but the structure stays.”

To be blunt, Calgary children are cheap labour for international drug-peddlers.  They are the foot soldiers, the grunts in the drug wars.  Even the Calgary gang leaders are just intermediaries, low-level functionaries in a supply chain that reaches around the globe, cogs in a big machine pushing dope up the supply chain to the wealthy oil executive with the coke spoon up his nose or the celebrity with the needle in her arm. 

And they are expendable.  At the moment, gang members are like mosquitoes – swat one and ten arrive to take its place. 

Still, Cst. Devolin labours in the trenches.  He doesn’t see his kids as small, insignificant parts of a large, impersonal organization.  To him they are individuals.  They have concerned, loving parents.  They come from communities that need them. 

Thank God for people like Cst. Devolin and his colleagues.  They are a small group, two cops, two former parole officers, social workers by training. 

Their program is called YARD, Youth At Risk Development.  Their job is to identify kids at risk and intervene early while there is still hope, before the gangs get their claws too deeply into the lives of these vulnerable children. 

In the coming weeks SECN will run stories about YARD’s work, its successes and its challenges.  From what I have heard thus far, Cst. Devolin needs all the community support and encouragement he can muster.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.