The Prevalence of Street Gangs in Montreal

Since the series of Italian café fire bombings in Montreal, public concerns have been raised about the looming threat of street gangs in the city.

“We’ve had street gang activity in Canada for decades. This is not a new phenomenon. I think largely we’ve chosen to ignore it,” said Michael Chettleburgh, author of ‘Young Thugs: Inside the Dangerous World of Canadian Street Gangs.’

Chettleburgh writes that gangs have been rooted in society for ages and acknowledges that socio-economic factors over the last 20 years have made them flourish in North America.        

“When you start looking at some of the precursors to today’s gang violence, they were seeded decades ago, and we’re just beginning to understand the size and the scope of the problem.”

Inspector Bernard Lamothe, head of the SPVM organized crime unit, sees gang activity as a serious problem that all 4,800 Montreal police officers are aware of.

“On a daily basis, combating street gangs is the number one Montreal police priority. Every action that we do is aimed at that,” Lamothe said. “The organized crime unit, which is my division, focuses mainly on combating the major gang members.”

Most of the big players in Montreal’s criminal underworld are currently serving prison sentences, leaving a power vacuum in the city’s lucrative drug trade for street gangs to swoop in.

“Take a young kid that’s eager for money and give him a pound of dope and say sell it on the corner and you’ll have a lot of takers in Montreal,” Chettleburgh said.

And Lamothe believes the number of active gang members in the city ranges from 300 to 500, with about one per cent of youth aged 16 to 18 involved.

“A lot of the core members are detained, but they’re in and out of prison so often they still control narcotics.”

Chettleburgh sees this kind of criminal activity as a pyramid scheme, where organized crime sits at the top and street gangs at the bottom, pushing money up the pyramid with risk pushed down.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing more collaborative relationships between street gangs and traditional organized crime,” he said. “Largely around the sale of drugs at the street level, which is in huge demand.”

However, the main issue for the public is the increasing visibility of gangs on city streets, causing fear for community safety.

“We tend to feel the street gang presence, so that gets us more fearful, because we can taste it, touch it, feel it,” Chettleburgh said. “It’s a fractious situation across the country and we’re not dealing with it very well from a policy perspective.”

According to Montreal Police, dealing with street gangs on a continuous basis is their priority, using research and prevention techniques to help youth leave crime and quit the gang culture.

“Every police station has officers that develop links with the community and schools,” Lamothe said. “And we’ve got street gang units that are dispatched in every region.