You see these bike guys at Spruceland, Parkwood etc. Young men in their twenties, muscular with prison tattoos. What gives? Drug couriers?

They definetly are crusing for chicks like the old days.

Any anyways, what reasonable male of that age would be caught on a bike unless they were making money? I suspect you are correct.

Is Spruceland the new downtown in terms of violence?

bohemian: nope. Spruceland has always been an area of high violence. Ahbau st. is right behind the mall....There is a multitude of rental properties in this part of town which house n'er do wells. Police have made regular visits there for as long as I have been in PG and that is over 20 yrs.

There are also a lot of good people in this area too who unfortunately fall victim to the baddies.

Nothing that a good case of Arrest, Convict, and Incarcerate wouldnt slow down.

In the old days if these guys were causing trouble they would have been pulled off their bikes and had their *A* kicked. However try that now and **You** go to jail.

I think we need to put together a middle class bat & pipe gang and fight back. Start eye-balling punks and beating the s... out of them randomly after every robbery, mugging, rape, assault, etc. Just make sure you hit a different one every time (unless you know who did it). After a while they'll be looking over their collective shoulders. The cops would probably turn a blind eye to it too.

Sound a little barbaric? Well, shouldn't we do something? What about a public rally. Why doesn't the city endorse a public fight-back violence campaign?

I was walking with three friends on Granville St. in Vancouver about 10 years ago and two huge American guys randomly assaulted 3 out of the 4 of us (I was the very lucky 4th). The police weren't interested in locating/finding the guys who blind-sided us. Two of my friends spent a couple of days in hospital. I asked the Vancouver PD if they planned to communicate our descriptions of these guys to the boarder and to the airport. One of the cops looked at me like that was a idea that they'd never thought of before but conceded that they probably wouldn't go to that much trouble for a "simple assault".
I asked why not? They said assaults are so common that they'd be working full time on assault cases so they can't put that kind of time into it.

I know we pride ourselves on treating crime with the most civilized response in the world but it's gone too far. I'd have much preferred if we'd spent the recent 4-10 billion dollars wasted on gov't debacles like the gun registry & sponsorship scandal over the past few years on prisons and paying criminologists to be creative with criminal justice programming and rehab strategies.

I think that one of the biggest single contributors to crime is fetal alcohol spectrum disorder FASD and other learning disabilities coupled with brutally inadequate parenting. Why don't we have a tracking system for youth who drop out of school. The justice system should identify their parents and bill them for restitution for crime and medical bills and to recover income assistance payments and other recovery needs. Why are we such an apathetic society in so many ways.

Of course Canada is about the best place on earth to live but we're loosing our way of life on a slow and inevitable track. We will have to draw a line in the sand at some point, won't we?

Steel, I agree with some of the things you said.

I've been in P.G. for over 35 years and have watched the crime rate go up tremendously. It's very rare to listen to the early morning news on the radio and not hear of another gas station being knocked off, a corner store robbed or somebody physically assaulted, something that used to be almost unheard of (or very rare) years ago.

I'm scared to walk in my neighbourhood in broad daylight ... and most other parts of town.

Trouble is, if we hurt one of these 'undesirables', take matters into our own hands, we'll likely be the ones charged.

The criminals, it seems, have more rights than the law abiding citizens.