BY RATTAN MALL

EVERY March for the past decade, there had been on average EIGHT gangland murders, following a period of relative peace over the preceding months.

However, this year only ONE murder occurred in March.

And even that was almost prevented.

Pardip Brar, 23, of Delta was shot dead on March 9 in the 6700-block of 137A Street.

Superintendent Paul Dadwal of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit – British Columbia (CFSEU-BC) credited this reduction of over 85 per cent in homicides this March to “a specific, predictive policing model.”

Dadwal, who oversees organized crime and gang investigations in the whole province, told me that strategic analysts and research analysts at the CFSEU-BC are studying crimes and shootings specific to gang conflicts and the findings are continuously applied throughout the year.

They study specific areas and locations, what type of car someone might be driving, the time someone might get shot, what jurisdiction and specific neighbourhood they might be in and so on – and from that they get specific trends, some very strong correlations with which to work with.

Dadwal said: “Because of our predictive policing methods we knew March was going to be the busiest. We knew which areas would be the busiest and so what we did was we used proactive enforcement. We changed people’s shift schedules, brought on extra people to the street – our goal was to target those neighbourhoods to see what could result from that.”

So how aggressive were police in March? The CFSEU Uniform Gang Enforcement Team (UGET) team conducted 1,200 checks of people and 200 vehicle checks within the identified target cities, one of which was Surrey. There were numerous arrests and numerous charges were laid.

But Brar, who was known to police, ended up being killed that night. Dadwal said: “In fact, where that murder happened, we were actually just around the corner. Unfortunately, we were not able to save Brar’s life though.  We were accurate in predicting that it would happen – time and date – in a certain area of Newton. Next time, I wish we are precisely there.”

Dadwal added that this method “is continuously applied throughout the year, but that’s just one example of what we are doing and how we are evolving with our partners and how we are actually targeting specific crimes.”

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