LET ME TELL YOU A SECRET ABOUT HARM REDUCTION

Vancouver Police Are Practising It Daily On The Street, Whether They
Know It Or Not, Or Just Don't Want To Admit It

I have been a police officer for some 26 years. I was a police
liaison with the Vancouver Agreement -- a city, provincial, and
federal government partnership dedicated to solving the longstanding
problems of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

I was the police lead for Vancouver's supervised injection site
project team as well as the North American Opiate Medical Initiative
and a member of the Citywide Enforcement Team.

I am the Vancouver Police Department's drug policy coordinator.

But I am also a police officer who came to the VPD from the RCMP in
1987 and walked a beat on Granville Street. At the time, arresting
people for using drugs was just simply part of what I did as a police officer.

However, I was lucky; I had a senior partner, Roy Fleming, who told
me this: "Always remember that the only difference between you and
them is that they stuck a spike in their arm and you did not,
otherwise they could be your neighbour."

So perhaps that's why nearly 19 years later I am here today to talk
to you about policing and harm reduction.

The police in Vancouver have a secret we don't want to tell you, but
I will share it with you today. We are harm reduction practitioners;
we just don't know it ourselves or we don't want to admit it.

I suggest harm reduction can simply be defined as the practice of
reducing harm. Therefore, anyone can be a practitioner, whether a
police officer, a street outreach worker, a drug user peer or a
health care worker, to name a few.

The public perception that needle exchange and injection sites are
the sole definition of "harm reduction" may undermine support for
harm reduction.

Police have an important role to play. In the mid-'90s a study
revealed that nearly half of the homicides in Vancouver occurred
within a 13-block radius of Main and Hastings Street, and involved
intoxication by alcohol, and a knife.

Enforcement at licensed premises was increased dramatically and over
the next five years we witnessed nearly a 50-per-cent annual
reduction in the homicide rate as the alcohol and knife homicides disappeared.

I suggest that the "saving" of those lives through selective
enforcement was harm reduction or reducing harm.

We also learned of research that showed a link between fatal heroin
overdoses and alcohol consumption.

So enforcement in licensed premises may have had an impact in
reducing the heroin overdose death rate and the homicide rate in the
late '90s and into this century.

Of course, there may have been other variables that could have
accounted for this. But what matters is that there was a shift in our
awareness and consciousness that police should do liquor enforcement
because it could save the lives of heroin users and others in the
Downtown Eastside.

The elimination of rice wine from corner stores was our greatest
success. Vancouver's public health officer and the coroner estimated
rice wine caused 100 deaths a year as well as thousands of calls for
ambulances.

Vancouver police partnered with the community, including the
Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and became an advocate for
having this product removed from corner stores.

Government stymied these efforts for years. Then in 1999, a group of
Vancouver police officers called the Odd Squad, the same officers who
created a film in partnership with the National Film Board called
Through a Blue Lens, volunteered to help. They created a startling
and provocative video showing the human face and misery of rice wine.

After some four years of discussion, legislative changes were enacted
within three months of the video's release. This almost sounds a bit
like activism to achieve social and political change.

In 2003, Vancouver police supported and worked with the supervised
injection site project team. The policing plan recommended our
officers encourage and direct intravenous drug users to use the site.
In many cases our officers used their discretion and actually
escorted users to the site with their drugs in hand.

I suggest this support was, and is, a reduction of harm or harm reduction.

In 2004 the VPD, with the support of the Vancouver Agreement, engaged
in enforcement Projects Lucille and Raven. These projects were
directed at the infrastructure of hotels, pawnshops, bars and so on
that support and perpetuate the cycle of crime, violence and
exploitation of the most vulnerable.

This was a harm reduction initiative and another example of
"community activism" to kick-start changes in government policy and practice.

The eventual outcome we hope will be decent housing for this
vulnerable population.

There may be times when enforcement and policing appear to be a
barrier to harm reduction practices such as needle exchange and
access to services.

The police have to balance this with the need to serve all members of
the community and maintain a level of safety and security for all,
including drug users.

As with the supervised injection site, we had to strike a balance
between ensuring ready and open access and also ensuring violence and
criminal activity on the street were kept to a minimum.

We may take a different path from our community and health care
partners to get there, and at times we may disagree about what the
best path should be. But we are all, in our own way, harm reduction
practitioners.