IF POLICE DON'T WATCH STREET KIDS, WHO WILL?

There's a guy named Dave Dickson who has worked with kids on the Downtown
Eastside for 23 years.

He never turns his pager off. He always returns the page as quickly as
possible even if it's his day off, even if it's the middle of the night.

Dave Dickson isn't a social worker. He's a good cop who cares fiercely
about a bunch of kids whom few others seem to care about. He's been known
to grab kids off the street, put them in the cruiser and take them home, or
if that's not safe, to jail for the night if he thinks it will help.

He's been threatened by at least one lawyer who said he'd charge Dickson
with assault because he has no right to do that to kids. Maybe he doesn't
have a legal right, but Dickson believes he has a duty to rescue them from
themselves even if it means putting them in handcuffs.

And nobody knows better than he that some of these kids can't be saved.
Dickson knew many of the women who ended up at Willy Pickton's pig farm and
he was one of the police who urged superiors to pay attention to the number
of sex trade workers who were disappearing from the Downtown Eastside long
before the media did.

Dave Jones is another guy who cares deeply about street kids, exploited sex
trade workers and the explosion in the use of crystal methamphetamines.
He's lobbied the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority to figure out a plan
for dealing with kids high on crystal meth because right now the hospitals,
crisis centres and everybody else refuses to take them. Jones doesn't think
it's right that police officers spend their shifts sitting in wagons parked
in hospital parking lots while kids in the back hallucinate, scream and
bang on the walls.

He's gone to Ottawa to lobby for gay bashing to be included as a hate
crime. Dave Jones is also a police officer. He's the inspector in charge of
the downtown business district where most of the street kids hang out.

Ray Petersen was given the national Child Recovery Award this year by Air
Canada and the RCMP. He's rescued more than 600 kids from the streets. He
goes out every morning with a bag full of candies that he's managed to get
somebody to donate and he looks for runaway teens. He's a got a little
black book with the names of the ones who are living in parks, alleys and
doorways in the Seymour-Davie area of Vancouver and he's always happy to
see that his kids have made it through the night.

When one of those kids says they're ready to go home, Petersen finds a way
to make it happen. He has good relations with the airlines and the bus
services, which often give free passes to runaways who have finally decided
to go home.

But the morning I was out with him, he was fretting about whether he had
enough taxi chits to get a young girl home to Squamish.

Petersen isn't a social worker or a police officer. He is the coordinator
of the Granville Community Police Centre, which is being threatened by
recent budget cuts. When he's not out looking for kids, Peterson is
desperately searching for sponsors to help out his kids.

Constable George Wong is new to the Seymour-Davie area. But he's learning
from people like Ray and the two Daves and when we came across a messed up
young woman coming down after a night of bingeing on coke, Wong told her
where she could go and get a shower and get some food.

He's learning that policing in Vancouver these days is a lot of social work
because a lot of times the police are the only ones on the street when the
kids need them.

Sure there are lots of social workers and counsellors and youth street
workers and addiction counsellors. Many of them are wonderful and dedicated
people like Sandy Cooke, the executive director of Covenant House, who has
worked with street kids for more than 40 years. He calls them his little
rascals. He says in all those years, he's never met a kid who didn't want
to be loved, who didn't respond to love and who wasn't afraid of the dark.
He's spent his life trying to make those kids feel loved and safe.

But for all social workers, late at night and early in the morning when
those kids are the most afraid, it's usually only the police they see
driving around watching out for the most vulnerable among them. So perhaps
it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Canada has the highest youth
incarceration rate in the Western world.

When a 14-year-old high on crystal meth is threatening suicide in the
middle of a bridge, it's the police, ambulance and firefighters who are
called on, not the social workers.

When these kids are violent, screaming and dangerous, it's the police who
keep them safe, not health-care workers, even though we long ago decided
that addiction isn't a crime, it's an illness.

When these kids want to get help, often it's left to police officers to
tell these kids "Sorry, if you want help you have to wait until noon when
the Youth Services Centre opens on Seymour Street and don't be late because
it's only open for four hours a day."

When these kids are finally desperate to get into rehab, it's often the
police who say, "Do you have quarters, because you'll need lots of them to
keep phoning the two or three treatment centres every morning for the next
six months or so until a bed is available."

It's not that these kids love police. They don't. They scattered like birds
when the marked car pulled up.

And it's not that the police signed up for this kind of work. They do it
because there is nobody else and they're getting tired, frustrated and
angry that they're being put in this position.

They've been put into this position because there's been no consistent
political advocate for kids and families. How could there have been with
seven different ministers in the last seven years?

Successive provincial governments have beggared youth services even though
each new administration and each new minister has ordered up yet another
study or task force that repeats what has been said consistently for more
than a decade. There need to be more services especially detox and drug
treatment so kids can get treatment when they need it. There needs to be
more coordination between service providers so kids can find what they
need. There needs to be help for families before they find themselves in
crisis.

But there's a very good chance that things are going to get worse because
the Liberal government is forging ahead with budget cuts and yet another
reorganization of the ministry of children and family development. The
latest minister in charge, Gordon Hogg, repeatedly promises to work magic
by doing way more with way less.

And what all of this means is that until they burn out, people like Dave
Dickson, Dave Jones, Ray Petersen and the others will fill in the gaps and
rescue the few kids that they can. They will do it by setting aside their
real work, which is supposed to be chasing the criminals who victimize
these kids.

There must be a better way.