Al Russell has been doing business from his downtown Prince George store for seven years and he’s never seen vagrancy, property crime and violent people causing problems like he has lately.
“It’s gotten 100 times worse in the last four or five years. When I first started you didn’t have people camped on Second Avenue,” said Russell. “Their numbers are increasing, we’ve never had this many homeless on our street and they’re mean. Greyhound shut down its bus service in Western Canada in October 2018 and until that point inmates were given bus tickets to their homes in other parts of B.C. or other provinces upon their release from custody at Prince George Correctional Centre. Now they get taxi rides downtown.
Russell says the jail in Prince George is the source of many of the undesirable people who frequent downtown and are causing problems for shop owners and their customers with their open drug use, and street loitering and their willingness to commit property crimes and threaten acts of violence.