DRUGS DRIVE PROPERTY CRIME

They're called the four percenters, and their rampant drug use is what
makes Vancouver's downtown a high-risk area for theft, William Boei reports

Not everyone who lives in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is a
drug-addled criminal focused only on getting high and stealing enough to
pay for it. Far from it.

But police and criminologists agree that some of the people who live
there really are chronic criminals who commit one offence after
another to feed their drug habits, and who are responsible for a big
piece of the city's high property crime rate.

They're often referred to as "four-percenters," a reference to the
widespread belief that four or five per cent of the population is
responsible for anywhere from half to 80 per cent of all property crimes.

They are a key component in The Vancouver Sun's major series Crime and
Consequence, which is finding that while the over-all crime rate is
going down, we are being swamped by property crime riding a high tide of
drug addiction.

"Drugs are the main driving force behind our property crime, no doubt
whatsoever," says Sergeant Gord Elias of the Vancouver police force's
Analysis Unit.

"We get to know our regular clients, and they are always breaking into
cars, doing break-and-enters and stuff, and we know that just about
every one of them is drug-addicted," Elias said.

That's the reason the city's new chief of police, Jamie Graham, sees
the Downtown Eastside as the issue that will make or break his
department's reputation, and perhaps the city's as well.

"Unless we wrestle this problem to the ground, Vancouver and the
Vancouver police will always be remembered for the Downtown Eastside,"
Graham said. "It is a blight right now."

Elias' unit and a Burnaby company, CPAL Inc., have both come up with
computer mapping and analysis techniques that show clusters of
property crimes, especially burglaries and thefts from parked cars,
occurring in all the residential and commercial neighbourhoods within
walking distance of the Downtown Eastside.

It is Vancouver's version of something every big city has -- a
low-rent district where society's tides deposit the poor, the
disabled, the drug addicts, the criminals and others who are unable to find
a holdfast anywhere else.

The Skids

It also attracts business enterprises, some legal, some not, that
cater to residents and to visitors, many of the latter looking for
illicit goods and services. The sex trade, the drug trade and illegal
gambling all settle in such places.

"I've lived in cities all over Canada," Chief Graham said, "and every city
has a low economic area, a drag, or the skids."

It produces a wave of property crime that washes over surrounding
neighbourhoods, and it's far from under control. Clearance rates --
the proportion of reported crimes in which the police are able to
recommend charges -- range from 14 per cent for all property crimes to less
than six per cent for break-and-enters.

The low rates are not because the criminals are too clever for the
cops -- far from it -- but because of limited police resources, to
perpetrators who don't know when to quit, and, says Graham, to victims who
don't protect themselves.

"It's opportunist-type stuff," Elias said of one Downtown Eastside drug
addict who has been picked up numerous times on theft charges but
always comes back for more."He's not a planner who sets up plans and
goes through skylights. He just walks the alleys and the streets
looking for something that isn't nailed down."

Such people tend to pursue "a lifestyle built on desperate partying," said
Simon Fraser University criminologist Paul Brantingham.

When they have money, they spend it. When the rent comes due or the
dope runs out, they go looking for more money, and they nearly always look
close to home.

Most of them stay away from wealthy but distant areas like West Point
Grey and Southeast Marine Drive because getting there is a problem, they
don't know their way around, they stick out as strangers and they have no
idea whether there is a pack of Rottweilers or a hoe-wielding gardener on
the other side of every manicured hedge.

So they rob homes, businesses and cars closer to home -- the
residential and commercial districts on and around the downtown
peninsula.

The patterns become clear every morning when Sergeant Elias' analysis
unit downloads the previous day and night's worth of property crime and
robbery reports from the main police computer, called PRIME BC.

Among other things, they extract the names of everyone who was
arrested or listed as a suspect, along with their photographs, crime
locations, file information on their previous crimes, their MO (modus
operandi) and so on.

It's distilled into easily digestible formats and posted on the police
department's Intranet (internal Web site.) It also goes to officers
doing follow-up investigations on earlier crimes.

"We've helped solve all sorts of cases," Elias said, adding that
patrol cops don't have the time or expertise to dig out such
information themselves.

"They come in, they grab their radio and their keys, they've got to
get out on the road right now. Their calls are stacked up and they're
in a rush. Our unit's job is to go into PRIME and suck it all out and do
an analysis of it and spoonfeed it to patrol."

The section also uses mapping software, much of it developed in-house,
to prepare weekly and monthly maps showing crime types and locations.
A glance at almost any of them shows cluster patterns in the
residential areas surrounding downtown.

Mug shots of suspects and maps showing current crime hot spots are
printed and posted in the parade room where street patrols begin every shift.

"It keeps them abreast of who got arrested, who's active, what they're
doing, who they're hanging around with, it's all in there," Elias said.

Later this year, the section hopes to place large-screen computer
monitors in the parade room, "so when they start their shift they can
just click, and up will pop the three or four hot topics of the day that
the analysts have prepared."

Sometimes the section uncovers startling patterns. One recent monthly
summary showed 11 reported thefts from autos in a single block of
Bayshore Drive near Coal Harbour, most of them in a parkade. Given
that only one theft in four is normally reported, there had probably
been 40 to 50 thefts from cars that month in a single block -- which
was quickly added to a list of locations that could benefit from an
undercover police operation.

But not all property crime is tied to the heroin and cocaine addicts
of the Downtown Eastside. Crime mapping and the experience of street
cops point to a growing population of "meth heads" a little farther west.

The Mall

"Everybody focuses on the Downtown Eastside and cocaine and heroin,"
Elias said, "but a whole other drug problem is the methamphetamine
problem down in the Granville Mall area and the West End."Many of the meth
addicts appear to be street kids. The police believe they're tied
to thefts from cars and of cars in the West End, as well as a flurry
of smash-and-grab break-ins of businesses across the Granville and
Burrard bridges on the south side of False Creek.

"We know, because we catch a lot of them," Elias said. "We know from
talking to them or we find the drugs on them -- and it's meth, crystal
meth. It's so addictive they have to do crime every day."

Elias acknowledges that clearance rates are low because police
resources are allocated to higher priority violent crimes.

"Unfortunately, property crime takes a bit of a back seat," he said. "But
what we're doing helps."

Burnaby's CPAL (Crime Prevention Analysis Lab Inc.) develops
commercial software for police agencies that don't have the Vancouver
police force's in-house expertise. Like Elias' unit, it extracts raw
information from police data bases, analyses and maps it to reveal
patterns that help solve crimes.

The company is named after and has close ties with SFU's crime lab,
which is run by Paul and Patricia Brantingham, criminologists with
global reputations who are key figures in the development of
environmental criminology. Kim Rossmo, a former Vancouver cop who
specializes in geographic profiling and now works on high-profile
crimes like the Washington sniper case, is one of their former
graduate students.

CPAL's software, called CrimePoint, identifies serial-crime patterns
and helps pinpoint the perpetrators, company president Ron Fisher says.

"It is designed to get the few per cent of people that commit 80 per cent
of the crime off the street, quickly," Fisher said.

CrimePoint not only maps the locations of crimes but also
cross-references them with the modus operandi of known criminals and
with where they live, work, go to school or like to drink, with whom they
associate and so on.

Patterns Of Crime

It deals with burglary, auto theft, arson, robbery, sexual assault and
violent crimes. A module covering organized crime and gang activity is
under development.

At its most dramatic, Fisher says, the software can identify likely
suspects in child kidnapping cases.

More commonly, it can reveal patterns like a string of Vancouver car
thefts in which the targets were all Ford Mustangs, most of them
either stolen or abandoned in one of two neighbourhoods. Once those
patterns emerged, said CPAL geographic information systems specialist
Michael Braun, it was child's play to pull up the name of a known car
thief who specialized in Mustangs, lived in one of the neighbourhoods and
went to school in the other.

When the car thief isn't already in the data base, such patterns can
be used to place bait cars near one of the suspect's preferred
locations.

The software is also useful when police catch someone in the act of
committing a crime such as a burglary. CrimePoint can match the method of
break-in, the burglar's search pattern, the type of property taken,
the location and other factors to come up with a list of similar
unsolved crimes that police then try to tie to the same suspect.

But while software can help the police analyse crime, the real battle
has to be fought on the streets, and that means coming to grips with drug
addiction.

"We have no doubt that if we can somehow have an impact on the drug
problem -- and when I say we, I mean society -- it will drastically cut
our property crime," Elias said.

Synopsis/ Violation

If you live near Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, chances are that
sometimes you feel overwhelmed by property crime -- breaking and
entering, car theft, theft from cars, snatch-and-grab offences and so
on. Most of it is committed by drug addicts, and it's not likely to
diminish unless and until we get a grip on the drug problem.