The fight to staunch a street war in Surrey, B.C.

Integration, but into the drug trade and gangs:

[Simon Fraser University criminologist Robert] Gordon, who has been studying the phenomena of drug crime and gang violence in Surrey for 20 years, says the recent trouble is just the extension of shootings that have come and gone dating back two decades. “It all stems from conflicts between groups trying to gain control over the illegal drug trade. It’s all about market share, retaliation-driven, including this latest round.”

It’s a “classic struggle,” says Gordon. In the 1980s a wave of new immigrants arrived from Honduras and El Salvador; they arrived at the same time as a group from Fiji, sparking an early conflict. By the early ’90s, new arrivals from Vietnam were muscling in on the area’s marijuana trade.

Surrey is a very mixed community, he adds. “It has a lot of new Canadians, and it seems as if each successive wave of minority populations runs into this particular problem: Often, they are coming over with poor English skills, low job prospects, they’re coming from places with a lot of violence. For some, the fast money the drug trade provides can be very attractive.”

The latest conflict came “after the arrival of a new group from the Horn of Africa, mostly Somalis,” he says. “They settled in Surrey because it’s less expensive than anywhere else in the Lower Mainland, and some appear to have moved in on existing drug networks run primarily by existing Canadians of South Asian origin. South Asian gangs, not wanting anyone to muscle in, are pushing back. A lot of shooting has involved just that.”

It was only last week that the Surrey RCMP dropped the shocking news that as of April 1, there had been 28 shootings—half of last year’s tally—in just the first three months of 2016. Until then, the public had only been made aware of 16.

Source: The fight to staunch a street war in Surrey, B.C.