SMART POLICING IS MORE EFFICIENT POLICING

The third in a series on policing the North Shore. See the issues of
Feb. 10 and 17 for stories on regional policing and North Shore
policing costs.

FOR an upstanding member of the community, Sue Tupper knows an awful
lot of drug addicts.

The North Vancouver RCMP corporal spends much of her day talking with
them, helping them where she can, and -- when necessary -- watching
them steal to support their habit.

As a member of the detachment's Crime Reduction Unit, it's Tupper's
job to track North Vancouver's chronic offenders -- many of whom are
motivated by addiction -- in an effort to stop their activities. The
unit's strategy is part of a larger trend within North Shore law
enforcement toward stopping crime before it happens.

The seven-member North Vancouver team was formed in April 2006 to
implement the new strategy. The unit uses data from an in-house crime
analyst to seek patterns in criminal behaviour. They work out where
the activity is clustering -- whether it be around individuals or
locations -- and try to predict where it will happen next.

"It's based on intelligence," said Tupper. "We know it's having a good
effect."

If someone is identified as a likely offender, the team will track
that person to catch them red-handed. Often the process will start
right after a known offender's release from jail for a previous crime,
said Tupper.

"What we've been doing has worked," she said. "We've been staying on
track with that."

The approach differs substantially from traditional policing in that
it is proactive rather than reactive, said Tupper. Police working
regular duty simply don't have the time to do the kind of surveillance
the unit must engage in; they might at any moment be called to a
traffic incident or a break-in or some other routine duty.

Members of the unit, by contrast, are assigned almost exclusively to
their project, meaning they can home in on a given target for as long
as they need to without fear of distraction.

"A general duty member has many jobs to do," said Tupper. "Our team
gets to focus."

And it's not all about enforcement, said Tupper. In many cases, the
unit has gotten to know the subjects of their efforts.

Repeat offenders are often addicted to drugs, committing their crimes
in order to support the habit. Where circumstance allows, the members
turn their efforts to helping those individuals rather than simply
arresting them. That may mean connecting them with a service in the
community, driving them to a drug treatment facility, even just
lending them an ear when they need it.

"We're very familiar with the drug users of North Vancouver," said
Tupper. "Often these people don't have any kind of support system
whatsoever."

While the corporal has confidence in the unit's approach, quantifying
its success is extremely difficult, she said.

"A lot of the crimes go unnoticed or unreported," said
Tupper.

Ending a spree of unnoticed shoplifting, for example, or uncovering
offences that would otherwise have gone undiscovered might not result
in a dip in the recorded crime rate, she said.

But the corporal points to anecdotal evidence to support her case. The
unit has had great success busting chronic thieves, she said, and
they've arrested dozens of people involved in dial-a-dope schemes.
Sometimes their efforts even lead to the disruption of larger scale
crime.

Tupper cited the example of an incident in February 2007 in which a
routine call by the unit led to a major fraud bust. Members of the
team were visiting the residents of a well-known drug house in North
Vancouver when they noticed people talking to the driver of a car
outside. The car was linked to a shoplifting incident of the day
before. When the officers approached the vehicle, it took off.

The unit tracked the driver to an apartment in Burnaby, where they
discovered a different car -- this one stolen -- parked outside. An
arrest and a raid on the home uncovered close to $200,000 in
counterfeit bills as well as drugs, guns and more than 100 stolen ID
cards.

By keeping tabs on the small-time offenders, the unit had reeled in a
much bigger fish, said Tupper.

"That's what you find," she said. "It's all related."

In West Vancouver, a similar idea has been taking shape. The WVPD has
had a Target Team -- a squad roughly analogous to the CRU -- for many
years, but as of Feb. 20, the entire department has adopted a new
proactive policing strategy called CompStat, based on a system
developed in New York in the mid-1990s.

Similarly to the strategies of the CRU and Target Team, CompStat makes
use of statistics to focus resources where offences are most likely to
happen in an effort to curb crime.

But the new system takes into account a broader range of factors and
it holds officers accountable for addressing identified problems.

"It's a more holistic approach to the problem," said Chief Const. Kash
Heed, who has been a driving force behind the initiative.

The system looks at geographical distribution of incidents, time of
day, crimes by category, patterns of victimization, even vehicle
pursuits and officer complaints.

The numbers are compiled and analyzed every 28 days. At the end of
each period, key staff meet to go over the figures, then hatch a plan
for the upcoming month to address any emerging trends. "If burglaries
are showing an increase, we will look at how we're going to approach
that," said Heed.

That may mean targeting a chronic offender, saturating an area with
police, implementing a crime prevention program, or some other tactic.
Pieces of the CompStat system have been coming online since he took
the reins, and already those portions have seen results, he said.

Similarly to North Vancouver, numbers to demonstrate the program's
success are hard to come by. But in West Vancouver's case, that's
because the system hasn't been in place long enough to generate them,
said Heed. He did offer anecdotal evidence, however.

Heed gave the example of a recent spate of break-and-enters in British
Properties. In accordance with the new system, the department analyzed
the pattern and piled officers into the area at times when the crimes
were most likely to happen. Through their investigation, a description
emerged of a van associated with the spree, and soon enough one of the
members spotted it.

With help from the Vancouver police, the van was found and the
suspects arrested. The spate of break-ins has stopped.

As the program gets up and running, its success will be more easily
quantified, said Heed. Each period, those in charge will review the
goals set out in the previous month to see if identified problems have
been addressed. If they have not, those who were supposed to address
them will be held to account. Heed is confident the numbers will
demonstrate its effectiveness.

The system is the way of the future, said Heed.

"You've got to police smarter."