VANCOUVER - Maybe the sight of a Mercedes racing down a busy street under a hail of bullets was the last straw for the citizens of Abbotsford.
The B.C. city of 135,000 in the Fraser Valley, about 60 kilometres east of Vancouver, prefers to be known more for its bucolic ambience than as a small-scale replica of the big, gang-infested city to the west.
But Abbotsford does have a gang problem -- police identify at least three -- so it's trying an old-time tactic to send a message to gangsters: Shunning.
Don't serve them in restaurants, bars or clubs. Don't sell them cars or electronics. In short, don't normalize their lifestyle and their place in the community.
"They don't like to have the spotlight shining on them," says Abbotsford Mayor George Peary.
"They prefer to operate in the shadows. The more that the community as a whole is aware of these individuals and refuses to do business with them ... it becomes less socially acceptable for them to move around our community."
A criminologist who's an expert on gangs says the tactic works because it employs the time-tested force of social pressure.
"It works better than laws or anything else if you establish a norm of what's right and what's wrong," says Prof. Ehor Boyanowski of Simon Fraser University.
Boyanowski says a country like Mexico has strong laws that are unenforceable because drug cartels have economic power in many areas and respect for the law is gone.
"You can have laws about what's legal and what's illegal and they're not worth the powder to blow them up," he says.
Abbotsford has had an organized-crime subculture for some time. The surrounding area's farm have harboured marijuana grow-ops and drug money has wormed its way into the local economy.
But things reached a tipping point for residents last month after someone tried to gun down Jamie Bacon as his luxury Mercedes sports coupe tooled through the city.
Bacon, one of the city's three notorious young Bacon brothers, was wearing body armour and escaped by driving over a median and crashing his bullet-riddled car into a restaurant parking lot.
Police had already warned the brothers, out on bail on gun and drug charges, that they were being targeted by rivals. They also warned very publicly that anyone associating with the brothers could be putting themselves in harm's way.
They've set up surveillance cameras on the street where the brothers live and a marked police car follows them around when they leave their parents' house under strict curfew restrictions.
"The neighbours don't object, although the civil libertarians aren't keen," says Peary.
But the city's leadership wanted to go further.
At a packed public meeting last week, citizens, especially merchants, were asked to ostracize the city's thugs.
Public shunning has biblical connotations -- though an ethnically diverse community, Abbotsford was once the buckle of B.C.'s "bible belt" -- but the idea was broached by former Vancouver deputy police chief Bob Rich, who became chief of Abbotsford's police department last July.
Peary concedes the strategy puts pressure on local merchants.
"The intent was not to place employees of businesses at risk trying to deal with some of these characters that are pretty widely known in the community, but rather to call upon the police," he says.
Peary's heard anecdotal reports some merchants have, through the police, ordered alleged gangsters off their premises.
It's a tough call to make, he admits. Gangster cash is as good as anyone else's, but their patronage is ultimately corrosive if regular customers decide the place is a gang hangout and stay away.
In Vancouver, some of the downtown restaurants and clubs favoured by criminals have been featured regularly on the nightly news as the locales of gangland slayings.
"It's a bit of a dilemma for people in the service industry but increasingly they're sensitive to the presence of these undesirables and what they might do to their legitimate business," the mayor says.
But shunning won't necessarily reduce gangsterism, says Boyanowsky. Criminals can simply dress differently, go to different places and keep a lower profile.
It may make the lifestyle less attractive to new young recruits, the criminologist says, but the ultimate social pressure comes from families.
"The most powerful thing we have going for us is shame," he says.
"If you could get the families to shun them and shame them, as well as the community, then I think you would get people at the recruitment level who might be less willing to participate."
