New police unit to investigate Lower Mainland gang murders

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The B.C. government is setting up a new policing unit to investigate gang murders in the Lower Mainland.

The gang homicide squad will operate within the existing RCMP-led Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, the B.C. Public Safety Ministry announced Thursday.

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

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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 on Thursday. “We are continuing to work alongside our policing 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 was critical of CFSEU, B.C.’s only anti-gang agency.

It said CFSEU had no responsibility to investigate gang murders, though it had over the years worked with IHIT on successful probes like the 2007 Surrey Six murder investigation, the 2009 slaying of Red Scorpion Kevin LeClair and the 2011 Kelowna murder of his fellow Scorpion, Jonathan Bacon. All resulted in convictions against members of the Red Scorpion and United Nations gangs.

“Formalizing a gang-homicide investigation responsibility for CFSEU, and building the necessary capacity, may benefit the implementation of a more viable gang-suppression strategy in B.C.,” the report said.

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Wayne Rideout, a former senior Mountie who retired as a B.C. assistant deputy minister and director of police services last year, earlier told Postmedia that he had requested the CFSEU review because “I was very concerned about the escalation of violence happening in our communities caused by these gangsters. I needed assurances that there were demonstrable results.”

Rideout said Thursday the government announcement about the new gang murder team was “really fantastic news.”

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

“One of the strategies in my view of disrupting and combating gangs is to investigate and solve gang murders and put those responsible away for murder sentences of 25 years,” Rideout said. “In addition to solving horrific murders, It’s a strong strategy to disrupting and destabilizing gangs.”

Rideout said that after the unit — formally called the integrated gang homicide team — is operational, “the next step is to monitor the performance to ensure this strategy is actually realizing results and outcomes.”

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The percentage of murders that are gang-related has steadily risen in B.C. from 21 per cent in 2003 to 46 per cent last year.

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

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

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

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

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

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kbolan@postmedia.com

X.com/kbolan

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