Surrey is losing teenagers to gun violence. More police alone won’t stop it.

In a single month this spring, Surrey lost three teenagers to gun violence. Two young men, aged just 16 and 18, were shot and killed in an underground parking garage in the Newton neighbourhood on May 10th in what police describe as a targeted shooting tied to B.C.’s gang conflict. Three weeks later, another 18-year-old was killed in a suspected gang shooting, the city’s 13th homicide of 2026.

The instinctive response, more officers, more enforcement, more money for policing, is already underway. But if governments stop there, Surrey will keep responding to tragedy instead of preventing deaths. Prevention, not enforcement, must become the centre of the city’s public safety strategy, and the evidence shows how.

The real question is not whether gang violence is a serious problem. It clearly is. The question is whether our response is serious enough to stop young people from being drawn into it in the first place.

The limits of paying for more policing

So far, the public response has followed a familiar script. Surrey’s mayor has called for a review of the decision to redeploy members of the Surrey Police Service gang unit, while pointing to nearly $100 million in increased police funding since 2021 and 189 new officers this year.

Police matter. Communities facing shootings need urgent investigation and accountability, and nothing here argues otherwise. But enforcement after young people are already armed, recruited, targeted or lost to tragedy is not prevention. It is crisis management.

Nor does spending more on it reliably make cities safer. Decades of research show that larger police budgets alone do not consistently produce lower crime rates. Policing now costs Canadians $22 billion annually, and in some cities consumes a quarter of the municipal operating budget, growing faster than transit or social services.

Meanwhile, the rest of the system is buckling. National crime rates may fluctuate from year to year, but the underlying pressures remain: backlogged courts, crowded remand centres and communities still grappling with serious violence. We are spending billions responding after harm occurs while investing far less in preventing it. That is not a strategy. It is a treadmill.

We know what prevents youth violence

Gang involvement is seldom the product of a single choice. It grows out of an accumulation of social, economic and personal factors that leave some young people searching for belonging, protection, identity and opportunity. Gang involvement is a social, educational and economic problem before it is ever a policing one, which means it can be interrupted long before a gun appears.

Public Safety Canada’s Crime Prevention Inventory catalogues programs with measurable results. Stop Now And Plan (SNAP) works with children showing aggressive or disruptive behaviour, and with their families builds the emotional regulation and decision-making skills strongly linked to reduced offending later in life. SafERteens reduces violent behaviour among youth by having them explore their values, their goals, and helps them find positive ways to resolve conflict. The Fourth R embeds healthy-relationship skills in school curricula and connects youth to supportive adults to help them build problem solving skills. Youth Empowerment Solutions (YES) provides afterschool programming to improve prosocial behaviours through empowerment by trained local teachers, and directly reduces aggressive behaviors in youth. Employment and job-training programs also reduce violence and justice-system contact by giving young people a legitimate stake in their own futures. The designs differ; the logic is the same. Violence is preventable when young people are reached early, supported consistently and offered real alternatives.

Surrey already knows this. The Surrey Wrap Program works with youth showing signs of gang-associated behaviour, bringing together schools, police, the city, families and community agencies to reconnect young people to home, school and positive role models. It is the right model. The problem is proportion: prevention remains a boutique line item inside a public safety budget dominated by enforcement.

A call to reimagine public safety

• Rebalance the money. The city should commit that any new dollar of police funding is matched by a fixed share for evaluated prevention programs, so prevention grows with, not instead of enforcement.

• Scale what works. Expand the Surrey Wrap Program and implement more evidence-based programs such as SNAP and The Fourth R across Surrey with stable multi-year funding.

• Measure prevention. Require every funded program to track outcomes, school re-engagement, reduced justice contact, and publish them, so the public can compare the return on a prevention dollar with the return on an enforcement dollar.

  
  

A prevention-first strategy is not soft on violence. It is serious about stopping violence before it happens, and honest about the fact that arrests after shootings cannot bring back the lives already lost. Surrey does not need to choose between enforcement and prevention; it needs both. But as long as prevention remains the junior partner, the city will keep arriving after the tragedy.

The lesson of this spring’s shootings is not simply that gang violence must be punished. It is that young lives must be protected before violence becomes inevitable.

Lisa Monchalin, Ph.D., J.D., is Lab Director of the Applied Justice Lab and teaches in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.