POLICE TAKE AIM AT PUBLIC DRUG USE Drug Deal Done In Front Of Police Chief Got Crackdown Going The breaking point came a few months ago when Vancouver Police Chief Jamie Graham was standing on East Hastings Street giving an interview to a magazine writer and a drug deal took place under his nose. Graham broke off the interview, went over to a woman who had just bought drugs, and told her to hand them over. She refused, so Graham took them out of her hand. When Graham related this to Insp. Bob Rolls -- whose command covers the Downtown Eastside -- Rolls decided something had to be done about blatant drug transactions and addicts injecting themselves in public - -- the kind of on-street drama police say would not be tolerated in any other North American city. For Rolls, it was clear that it was time to start enforcing drug possession laws again, something Vancouver police had stopped doing in the face of the courts' indifference to simple possession charges. "In the past, the Crown didn't seem to consider the difference between someone shooting up in a rooming house or at a bus stop. I felt we should become more strategic about who we were charging and we should go after people doing this in public," Rolls said Wednesday. The hot spots in the Downtown Eastside to be targeted are the intersections of Main and Hastings, Hastings and Carrall, Hastings and Columbia, and Hastings and Abbott. Rolls said police will especially go after anyone using or distributing drugs in Oppenheimer Park, the worst patch of ground in the district. "It's a nightmare. We've had turf wars for control of the drug trade there. We've had stabbings, shootings, assaults and ongoing drug transactions in a park that is still used by some families. I'm saying now that if you use or sell drugs in Oppenheimer Park or have drugs in your possession, we will charge you," said Rolls. Officers have been warning addicts for the past two weeks that a crackdown was coming and that on-street drug use won't be tolerated any more. After publicly announcing Tuesday that police will arrest anyone using drugs in public, Rolls went for a walk through the Downtown Eastside and spoke with addicts. "I asked them what they thought and they all said something had to be done. Things had gone too far." The police initiative has the backing of former Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell, now a Liberal senator. "You can't allow public disorder to continue," said Campbell, the author of the city's four-pillar approach to the problems of drug addiction: prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement. "I know some people don't like to hear it, but enforcement is one of the four pillars, which is why we added 30 police officers the first year [he was in office], then a further 50 with another 50 supposed to be added to this year's budget," he said. Campbell said he wasn't sure such crackdowns would work until he went to the Carnegie Centre's 100th anniversary last year after the police had targeted drug dealers congregating around the centre. "I had old people coming up to me saying now they could visit the centre and for the first time in years they felt safe," said Campbell. Police will now charge anyone smoking crack cocaine or marijuana or injecting illegal drugs in public. Rolls said the street activities of drug dealers and addicts are compromising the safety of the public and causing economic distress for merchants in the Downtown Eastside. After police stopped arresting people for simple possession, they dealt with it informally by seizing the drugs and in some instances, breaking crack pipes. Rolls met with federal prosecutors a month ago to revisit the issue of arresting and charging people who use drugs in public, and an agreement was reached on how charges could be processed. Bob Prior, Pacific region director of the federal prosecution service, said the police spoke about the difficulties they were having controlling the open use of drugs in the Downtown Eastside. "They said the situation is approaching the critical point and they need to create a cultural change so it's no longer acceptable to be injecting drugs in the street," he said. "There's a lot of frustration for the police and we're not unsympathetic," said Prior. The Crown will only proceed with charges if there is a reasonable prospect of conviction and if the prosecution is in the public interest, he said. "The vast majority of cases we decline is because of insufficient evidence or a bad search," he said. "Or if the case is so minor it's not in the public interest to prosecute, for instance, if a person is found with an old crack pipe with traces of drug in it, it's not really strong enough." However, the meeting with the police produced a strategy for dealing with the problem, he said. "We were talking about how to become more effective, working together rather than working separately. But, I wouldn't want to give the impression we've lowered our standards, because that's not the case," said Prior. He has asked the police to provide more evidence on how open-air drug use is affecting the Downtown Eastside so it can be addressed on sentencing. "Stores closing, people afraid to go there, the impact on the tourist trade -- we need that kind of information." The charge for on-street drug use will be possession of a controlled substance -- the most minor of drug offences -- but one that can result in a six-month jail term, although Prior and Rolls said they are not looking to put people in prison. Rolls says he believes addicts will stop using drugs in public because of the threat of arrest. "They won't want to be arrested and fingerprinted and photographed and put through the system and released on conditions. People wonder if we are really serious about it and I can tell them that we are."
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