Constable, Vancouver Police Department

John Gravengard fights gangs in his spare time. Neither a gun nor a badge is needed in the volunteer work that the SFU criminology grad does when he’s not on police duty. It’s an effort that doesn’t generate the media headlines usually splashed on dramatic arrests and seizures of firearms, drugs, and bundles of cash.

Gravengard, who joined the Vancouver police about a year ago, works with schoolchildren during his time off. In cooperation with community centres and schools, he puts together daylong events where kids can play and find encouragement to take up activities they may want to excel at, such as sports.

For him, one youngster who gets positive reinforcement is one fewer potential recruit for gangs.

“I can’t change the whole world or Vancouver,” Gravengard told the Georgia Straight, explaining what he hopes to accomplish down the road. “If you can change one kid’s perspective of what gangs are or what policing does or what crime is, if you change that one little mind, in turn they’ll later remember that and they’ll do something positive. It’s kind of a snowball effect: you help out one person and they help the next person and they keep helping the community.”

As a high-school student at John Oliver secondary school, Gravengard said, he saw how gangs lure young people with too much time on their hands and no outlet for their energies: they start off with cigarettes, and the smokes become marijuana joints. Then harder drugs come in, and before the new recruits realize it, they’re already into dealing.

Gravengard said he wants to give back as much as he can to the public because it was a nurturing community that helped him and his two siblings in their family’s time of need. They were raised by a single mom, a native of the Philippines who got divorced early from their German father.

“I grew up in a family where there was a lot of support from our church and the community,” he said of his childhood in South Vancouver. “My mom went to school. Instead of her paying for a baby sitter or putting us in daycare, the families in the church would take care of us.”

According to the latest available statistics from the police-services division of the B.C. Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, 117 homicides were recorded last year, 29 more than in 2007. Minister Kash Heed, a former police officer, has noted that many of these killings were related to gang activity. Except for homicides, all other crime indicators went down in 2008.

Gravengard’s volunteer work has reached the attention of active antigang education advocate and Langara sociology instructor Indira Prahst. “In Indo-Canadian families, for example, or certain traditional Chinese families, you’re not going to be talking to your parents about certain things, and so when you have a younger police officer, you can create that contact,” Prahst told the Straight, referring to the boyish-looking officer who turns 25 this October.

“What we find is if they [youth] have a sense of connectedness and belonging, they’re not going to be seeking that in gangs,” Prahst added.