POLICE CHIEF OVERACTING ABOUT CHRONIC THIEVES, PROPERTY CRIME

Take a Valium chief. Caught the Gotham Assassins yet? How about any
gangsta killer?

Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu is a mischief-maker. Wringing his hands
over chronic property-crime offenders and fulminating about the need
to jail them was a performance unworthy of the promise he held out on
taking office.

Take a Valium, chief. Caught the Gotham Assassins yet? How about any
gangsta killer?

Vancouver has long been blighted by drug addicts, most with
psychiatric problems, who support their habit and supplement meager
social assistance or disability pensions with petty crime.

Maybe the chief remembers back a few months when his own department
put out a report saying officers spent too much time doing social and
mental health work and this was a bad use of taxpayers' money.

Guess what, chief?

They are, by and large, the same people.

This population clogs up our courts, diverts officers from more
serious crime and consumes an inordinate share of our medical and
social service resources.

Statistics show nine out of 10 property crimes are drug-related, most
committed by recalcitrant, invariably addicted recidivists.

You may have heard a lot of public debate during the last decade over
precisely this issue.

Nothing Chu raised at his press conference this week was
new.

So why did he do it on the eve of the opening of the new Community
Court project -- an innovative and hopeful attempt to address the problem?

Was he trying to scuttle it before the experiment even got off the
ground? Is he worried giving social support to these people instead of
locking them up might work?

I thought we long ago decided spending $55,000-plus to house a junkie
in prison was a dumb use of tax money. Medical treatment and social
services are cheaper and have a better track record of turning someone
around.

It costs only about $40 a day for drug treatment at a local
not-for-profit facility.

This troubled group of people is the target of the Four Pillars
approach and other novel public policy strategies because jailing them
has proven to be an expensive failure.

On top of that, our provincial institutions are overcrowded and benign
petty criminals with mental health ailments do not belong in
penitentiary.

If we were to follow Chief Chu's suggestion, it would cost us millions
to build and maintain new jails to deal with these supposedly 379
chronic offenders who don't pose a risk. Let's get real.

We could assign an individual cop to babysit each of these losers
every day if they were the scourge Chu claims. We don't, because it's
a waste of money. So is hiring prison guards to do that job.

And, for the record, whenever one of these petty, messed up criminals
commits an offence in which someone is hurt or even frightened, the
courts in this province do hit them hard.

Earlier this year, the Court of Appeal upheld an eight-year sentence
handed a long-time, drug-addled recidivist because he scared the hell
out of a woman before running away during a burglary.

In a decision meant to guide lower court judges, Justice John Hall
emphasized that lengthy prison time is warranted under such
circumstances to protect the public.

Shoplifting or stealing a bike shouldn't get you years of
imprisonment; hurting or putting someone at risk is a different matter.

The police chief is crying wolf about property crime to win headlines.
He should be more worried about violent offenders and gang crime.

I say let's see what happens with the Community Court and the attempt
to direct health and social services towards this sad and tragic population.

They are not a threat; they have become a "criminal" nuisance for
myriad personal reasons, and because we have not provided the
necessary health or social support.