Williams Lake, B.C. – A recent meeting held to address gang violence in Williams Lake has helped “get the discussion started.”

That from youth worker Pat Graham, who helped organize the gathering at city hall last week.

“I think the meeting went really good,” said Graham, who opened up his business ‘Guardian Youth at Risk Services’ last fall. “We didn’t get the turnout that we wanted to get because it was during work hours, but overall the whole plan is actually working.”

He says the meeting “is getting people talking and giving people their voices back. Slowly but surely people are coming on board.”

Graham says the meeting addressed some of the violent acts that have been committed recently in town, including a shooting and stabbing.

He also says one of the “big things that came up” included the role of landlords in the community who he said asked “what can we do, we don’t even know who we’re renting to half the time.”

Would more boots on the street like the recently announced 100 police officers to help Surrey with their gang war help?

“Yeah, absolutely. These guys (Williams Lake RCMP) have three or four cars out at night – they’re supposed to handle two different gangs shooting at each other in vehicles? They don’t have enough manpower to do it.”

Mayor Walt Cobb was also at the meeting, but is reluctant to admit the city has a gang problem.

“They’re not gangs, they’re thugs, but they are causing a lot of havoc here and we’re not prepared to live with it,” he said. “So the hope from this meeting is to pull all agencies together, because there’s a lot of agencies that are dealing with this issue and we need to pull them together so we can do this on a united front rather than fragmented.”

A second meeting has been tentatively planned for after this weekend’s Williams Lake Stampede.