BC Police Finally Realize That 'Beeba Boys' Won't Ruin Their Anti-Gang Operations

It's not often that a Canadian police force puts a movie on notice.

Then again, BC's Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit isn't a regular police force. Billed as "the largest integrated policing unit in Canada," it's tasked with disrupting, suppressing, and dismantling the province's notorious gangs.

Last month the anti-gang unit weirdly took aim at a Canadian-made film about Sikh gangsters in dandy outfits, telling CBC it rolled back years of outreach and gang prevention efforts.

"Kids were telling youth workers and even some police officers this was their Scarface," recalls gang unit rep Sgt. Lindsey Houghton of the weeks before Beeba Boys opened in Surrey theatres on October 16.

The trailer for Beeba Boys

This year had already been a busy one for Surrey's police and low-level crime element. Violent crime is up somewhere between 34 and 52 percent over last year. Nearly half of some 40 reported shootings took place over a few trigger-happy weeks of the spring and summer. Police linked many of those early 2015 shootings to young, mostly South Asian kids beefing over street-level drug turf—some of whom have now been arrested and charged. (Two kids died, others showed up at hospitals with gunshot wounds.)

Houghton and his team didn't like the idea that while a couple dozen of these recent high school grads cruised around in their parents' cars with handguns in their underwear, Beeba Boys filmmaker Deepa Mehta was name dropping Bhupinder "Bindy" Johal in local press. Johal was a media-savvy gangster from the 1990s who had what filmmaker Mani Amar calls a Straight Outta Compton attitude. Amar's documentary A Warrior's Religion followed the rise and fall of major gangland players like Johal in the 90s. After dying in a hail of bullets in '98, Johal has cultivated a new generation of YouTube fans, where you can watch him deadpan to a news camera: "You got another thing coming, bitch."

So law enforcement got nervous about a movie based loosely on real events, some from Johal's life. But after a three-week run in Surrey's Strawberry Hill Cineplex, the anti-gang unit is now confident this wasn't the "South Asian Scarface" they thought it would be.

"I'm not a film critic, but it seems like a lot of people just didn't like the movie," said Sgt. Houghton after the film's closing screening on November 6. "I'm sure there's some people who like it and think it's their Scarface, but I think it's a lot less than we originally thought."

At the film's final showing, there were further hints this wasn't the 103-minute gang recruitment ad Sgt. Houghton and his team expected. A handful of couples and teen girls inhabited a mostly-empty theatre, enduring a few stilted samosa and turban jokes. The film has so far earned 44 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

It just so happens Surrey's real-life crime element has been relatively quiet since Beeba Boys came to town.

Quiet, but not exactly silent. In another conflict, a man with a gunshot wound in his leg showed up at an Abbotsford hospital last week, but refused to cooperate with police. But the incident and ones like it have flown under the media radar.

Amar says over the last decade, attention and community mobilization has often been fleeting—flaring up only when there are people shot and dying on the streets. Though attention has waned since the summer, he says there's still a couple dozen more kids that could cause trouble at any time.

Amar tells me he's seen the same cycle happen a few times: after a shooting spree, the South Asian community pays attention and makes some headway—hosting forums and even confronting family members about gangs. But when the media spotlight cools off, "that's when these jackasses with guns start playing Wild Wild West again."

For all it's awkward clichés and accurate moments, Mehta's film has sparked some earnest discussion about what's been happening for a long time. "Isn't that always the goal?" Amar says. "We use things that maybe don't look the greatest in hindsight but make it into a positive thing."

Maybe the anti-gang unit is keeping the pressure on, maybe a beef is temporarily settled, or maybe these kids' families have intervened—but we can't fully rule out the possibility some of them actually went to see Beeba Boys and didn't especially like what they saw.

"I haven't seen the film, but you can quote me on this: I don't know any gangsters who want to be dressed like that," quips Amar. "None of these assholes call each other to coordinate what they're wearing."

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