U.S. EXPERTS DEBATE DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE'S POLICE CRACKDOWN

Criminologists Flown In By Opposing Lobby Groups Square Off Over Use Of
New-York-Style Get-Tough Approach

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside becomes a battleground today for competing
theories on how to bring law and order to decaying inner cities.

The conservative Fraser Institute is bringing in one of the world's
best-known criminologists, Californian James Q. Wilson, co-author of the
"Broken Windows" approach to policing that was used by New York City police
to sweep drug dealers, prostitutes, gang members and panhandlers off the
streets of Manhattan.

New York hired thousands of extra cops in the mid-1990s to drive visible
crime and disorder off the streets. The campaign made a crime-fighting hero
of then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Downtown Eastside activists, meanwhile, are flying in Chicago law professor
Bernard Harcourt, who criticizes Broken Windows as a civil liberties
nightmare that attacks the poor and homeless and doesn't necessarily reduce
crime. Their visit may heat up the debate over the Four Pillars program
being implemented to tackle the drug problem on the Downtown Eastside.

The Fraser Institute has not taken a stand on Four Pillars. But executive
director Michael Walker, calling Wilson "the top conservative criminologist
in the world," said if there's any conflict between Four Pillars and Broken
Windows, "I would be guided by Jim (Wilson)'s insights rather than by
anything else."

Only one of the four pillars -- enforcement -- has been launched so far
with a beefed-up police presence on downtown streets. Mayor Larry Campbell
has been struggling to find resources for the other three: prevention,
treatment and harm reduction.

But Wilson said in an interview he is skeptical that Four Pillars will do
much good in cleaning up the Downtown Eastside.

He said he's not against harm reduction for drug users, but "that doesn't
say anything about how you make downtown safe for people who are not drug
users."

Harcourt said there is no evidence Broken Windows reduces crime, and that
while the New York campaign produced more orderly streets, it also spawned
complaints about police misconduct.

Elsewhere in the U.S., Broken Windows ignited what has become known as "the
Blue Revolution," a series of big-city police crackdowns on minor offenders
in high-crime neighbourhoods with the hope that major crimes would also be
deterred.

The term "Broken Windows" was coined in an Atlantic Monthly article by
Wilson and co-author George Kelling in 1982.

They wrote that "if a window in a building is broken and is left
unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." They applied
the same rule to whole neighbourhoods, which they said can deteriorate into
chaos and disorder if criminals and non-criminals alike get the message
that nobody's in charge and vandalism and crime are tolerated.

They argued that law-abiding citizens fear not only crime and criminals,
but are also afraid of "being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent
people, nor necessarily criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or
unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers,
prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed."

In practice, Broken Windows crackdowns have chased such people out of
troubled neighbourhoods, and the crime rate in those cities has fallen sharply.

But crime has fallen just as sharply -- and farther, in some cases -- in
cities that did not conduct crackdowns. It also fell during the same period
in Canada, where there were no Broken Windows campaigns.

Wilson toured the Downtown Eastside on Thursday evening and was scheduled
today to make media appearances and possibly do another tour, followed by a
speech to a Fraser Institute luncheon on Broken Windows: Cleaning up the
Downtown Eastside.

After the speech, Wilson is off to Walker's Vancouver Island retreat. The
two have been friends for years.

Harcourt will also make the media rounds and tour the neighbourhood and
will likely hold a news conference outside the Hyatt Regency Hotel
following Wilson's luncheon speech inside, said organizer Thia Walter of
LINES -- the Life is Not Enough Society. Harcourt planned to spend the
weekend studying harm-reduction measures in the Downtown Eastside.

Wilson said he can't prove Broken Windows-style policing reduces the crime
rate, and that its principal aim is "improving the conditions of public order."

"Suppose you go into a neighbourhood and clean up the graffiti, disperse
the prostitutes, make sure that teenage gangs are not harassing innocent
citizens, suppose you do all of these things," he said. "Will the crime
rate fall in that neighbourhood?

"George Kelling and I speculated that it would, but we as yet have no firm
evidence that it does, because nobody has tried to test the Broken Windows
idea in a way that would permit you to evaluate it honestly."

Wilson wasn't familiar with Four Pillars but on the basis of some of the
phrases used to describe it, such as harm reduction, he declared himself
skeptical.

"I think that making drugs safer for drug users does not solve the problem
of drug-related crime," he said.

He denied accusations by Amnesty International and others that the New York
Broken Windows campaign used racial profiling, targeting more blacks and
Hispanics than others.

"I have little patience with civil liberties advocates that tell us that no
crime enforcement policy can ever be successful unless it treats all racial
and ethnic groups equally," Wilson said. "That is simply statistically
impossible. We are concerned about behaviour. We are not concerned about
identity."

Harcourt said he plans to discuss the track record of Broken Windows-style
policing while he's in Vancouver.

Many proponents of Broken Windows claim it does reduce the crime rate,
Harcourt said, even though "it's pretty clear that there's no good
social-scientific evidence that disorder is related to serious crime."

He said there is evidence that when street people have been targeted in
Broken Windows campaigns, civil liberties were violated.

Allegations filed with a civilian complaint review board of police
misconduct rose 68 per cent in New York from 1993 to 1996, he said,
complaints of police abuse filed in court rose 40 per cent and Amnesty
International reported "racial disparities" in the way police chose their
targets.