READER APPALLED AT OFFICER'S CONDUCT

This letter is in response to Project Rock Cut as it was dubbed by
the OPP in Bracebridge.

As a concerned citizen, I am appalled at the conduct of the
undercover operations. It appears to me that in the majority of these
arrests it was not a matter of the officer buying drugs directly from
these defendants.

Instead it sounded like an officer had in many instances, attached
himself to what he felt were the weak links in the community.

In my opinion, an officer abused his position of authority if he
passed himself off as a friend and used various defendants to
introduce him to other defendants as a friend. It appears he might
not have received drugs directly from the defendants, but rather had
one defendant introduce him to another, whereupon he handed defendant
one the money to hand to defendant two. While the officer and the
defendants were all present, defendant two would then hand the drugs
back to either defendant one or directly to the officer.

While I abhor drugs and am a great advocate of ridding communities of
the dealers who sell them I find it even more abhorrent if an officer
of the law can legally entrap already disenfranchised individuals in
order to put them in the position of being a middleman in a drug deal
that would never have happened because defendant one was not in
possession of the drugs to sell until the undercover officer begged
him to find him some drugs.

I believe that my opinion of this matter is substantiated by the fact
that many of these charges involved very small quantities of drugs.

In many cases there were no drugs seized during the arrests as the
individuals in question while having racked up a large amount of
trafficking charges never actually possessed the drugs.

Even the $50,000 seized does not justify the cost of a six-month
investigation and the cost of legal aid, the court's time and the
cost of imprisoning these drug users and quasi dealers.

The money would be far better spent on rehabilitating these people.
However, because of lack of funding, there is sometimes a three-month
waiting period just to have an assessment done in order to attend
rehab. There is usually another period of six or eight weeks until
rehab is available. The money spent on the undercover investigation,
the court system, the legal aid system and incarceration would
probably have paid for instantaneous rehab for these 28 invidivuals
at a private facility.

If this project had made any kind of impact on ridding the community
of drugs I would feel differently. However, even the police refer to
it as a street-level operation. As long as the real dealers are
providing drugs to street-level addicts to trade amongst themselves
the problem will never be rectified. There will always be more
disenfranchised individuals who will become pawns in this deadly game.

Our tax money needs to be spent on getting to the root of problem
instead of the tip of the iceberg. On top of all these facts the
method which the police used to make these arrests pitted these
individuals against one another, putting some of them in grave danger
of retaliation.

Is this really okay?

Wendy Gilbert

Woodstock