SURREY PLAN TO FIGHT CRIME A BOLD STEP IN RIGHT DIRECTION

Surrey's crime-fighting strategy, announced yesterday, is certainly
ambitious. And Mayor Dianne Watts is clearly expending a lot of
political capital on what she's billing as a collaborative effort by
more than 100 people from over 50 organizations and three levels of
government.

Watts boasts that the multi-faceted scheme, which seeks to apply
crime-reduction practices from the U.K. and New York to her
fast-growing city of nearly 420,000, will address the "root causes" of
crime.

And it certainly represents a different approach to the one adopted by
the City of Vancouver, with its focus on reducing the harm caused by
drug addicts by giving them what they want.

For one thing, there seems to be much more emphasis on actual law
enforcement, with the hiring of extra police officers, the use of spy
cameras in "crime hot spots" and the setting up of swift-acting
community courts.

The plans also calls for "zero tolerance" toward graffiti and other
neighbourhood blights -- an approach based on the "broken windows"
theory that has proved so effective in New York and other major U.S.
cities.

So far, Watts has not put a dollar figure on implementing the Surrey
strategy's scores of suggestions.

So let's hope it's not simply a case of political wishful-thinking.

But on the surface, at any rate, it sounds as if it has a realistic
chance of some success.