POLICE PLAN TO CLEAN UP DRUG MARKET WAS HATCHED LAST FALL

Embarrassment Over City's Image Drove Force To Act

Not everyone inside the Vancouver police department agreed that police
should make cleaning up the Downtown Eastside drug market their focus.

Some officers argued strongly that there were other, more compelling
problems worth going after -- problems that Inspector Bob Rich doesn't want
to mention for fear that other groups will get upset when they realize they
were pushed down the list.

Others thought the drug issue was worth tackling, but weren't sure there
was anything the department could do that would be effective.

But in the end, a combination of embarrassment over the city's reputation,
concern that the drug market was starting to grow and spread, and
impatience with the lack of action from any of the other "pillars" in the
city's much-talked-about four-pillars approach, helped push the plan for a
"city-wide enforcement team" to the front, shortly after after Rich
proposed that goal in a memo to police chief Jamie Graham earlier this year.

For many in the public, the police plan and a request for $2.3 million from
council to support it seemed to appear out of the blue -- and conveniently,
just a few weeks before budget decisions were to be made.

Chief Graham had talked several months before about simply needing 44 more
officers, with no mention of their being needed to clean out the drug market.

And, when Inspector Doug LePard gave the first media interview four weeks
ago confirming the police were going to initiate the crackdown, he said it
was being done after the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority asked police to
do something.

But puzzled health authority officials said they had no idea what he was
talking about and that they had never asked for any massive police crackdown.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the politics behind the
police action. Also unclear is what discussions the health authority had
with police about the plan. Health officials have not been available for
comment this week.

But it's clear in talking to many senior police officers that the city's
drug problem had become a major issue for them, that they firmly believed
that other partners in the four-pillars drug strategy were supporting their
plan, and that they believe they've shown the greatest commitment of all of
them to acting to solve the problem.

The plan began to sprout last fall when Inspector Jim Chu, who is in charge
of the west side District 4, pulled together a committee of people to look
at how to tackle the drug issue in the city.

"We initially wanted to understand how we could address what was
happening," Chu said.

"We began to understand that a lot of the problems we were facing in other
areas came out of what was happening on Hastings and the open drug market
there."

"There was a lot of frustration in a lot of the districts," recalls
Inspector Dave Jones, who is responsible for the downtown.

"We were continuing to wait like Godot in terms of the other three pillars.
There were lots of meetings and lots of minutes, but we were not seeing
enhanced treatment or job creation or anything. All I heard about was the
trendyisms, like the SIS [safe-injection site]."

LePard, who is in charge of the three-month project that includes tripling
the number of police officers in the area and cracking down on pawn shops
and the stolen goods trade, said the Downtown Eastside had become a sore
spot for police.

"We looked at the level of distress and decided it was a real embarrassment
we couldn't tolerate any longer."

The committee thrashed over what their focus should be if they tackled the
drug issue: Property crime? The open drug market? Arresting dealers only?
Arresting users and dealers?

Police had already heard a talk a few years before by George Keeling -- the
popularizer of the "broken windows" theory that said police could prevent
crime epidemics by focusing aggressively on the first signs of civil
disorder. Keeling said that, if police tried to break up an open drug
market like the Downtown Eastside's, it would inevitably ripple out to
other areas.

"He said, 'If you spread it, you have to follow it,'" remembers Jones.

Jones said police thought the safe-injection site would be in place by the
time they started their project.

"Ideally, we would have liked to see the SIS operation, along with
realistic action on treatment and detox," said Jones.

Mayor Larry Campbell had promised to have a safe-injection site in
operation as soon as possible after his election in November.

But the date kept getting pushed back, as everyone waited for Health Canada
to develop a process for applying for a safe-injection site. Ultimately,
the health authority's proposal didn't go to Ottawa until March 7, and only
after a last-minute visit in February to a safe-injection site in Zurich by
four top health-authority planners. And now everyone is still waiting for
the federal approval.

As for the health authority's plan for treatment, harm-reduction, including
four safe-injection sites, and prevention -- the other three pillars -- it
has a $50-million plan for all of those and no sign of any way to pay for it.

Police say they were being pushed by health-authority planners and the city
to come up with a plan for the fourth pillar, enforcement. So they did.

But it's not clear whether the health authority expected them to implement
the plan immediately or wait for further discussions.

Rich says that, once Graham and the department agreed to make the Downtown
Eastside drug market the focus, he started telling the city and health
authority what they were planning in the many overlapping sets of meetings
that have evolved around the city's drug strategy.

No one ever suggested that police should delay their plan, modify it, or
wait until other pillars were in place, he said.

"They have been watching us develop this. There hasn't been one objection
from them."

Rich said he didn't expect the health authority or city to make suggestions
about the police plan, since the health authority develops its own plans
without asking for police advice.

However, he said he did ask to have health staff talk to his officers about
ways to direct addicts to health services, and they developed a referral
card they can hand out to addicts they meet on the street.

Police also took their plan to the police board. While the police board
sets a general direction, it doesn't have the authority to tell police how
to run day-to-day operations.

Finally, police went to council asking for the money to run the operation
past the three months that police have agreed to fund it internally.

Their request wasn't even discussed at council's final budget meeting --
but Jones sees that as a positive.

"Council deliberately didn't move the motion. That leaves the door open,"
he said.

Campbell has said that, if the police can prove at the end of the
three-month first stage that their plan is effective and doing no harm,
they could come back to council and possibly get the money they were asking
for.

Then it will be up to everyone involved to make their case.

Police have a graduate student evaluating the crackdown and will be looking
at crime statistics. It's not known if or how health-authority staff are
planning to evaluate what is happening at their end.

Health advocates say their biggest concern about police crackdowns is that
they produce negative health consequences for addicts.

Worried about being picked up in public, addicts use drugs in more secret
places where they're more likely to die if they overdose, more likely to
share needles and get infected, and more likely to be be victims of violence.

People working in social services in the Downtown Eastside say they've seen
people who are just regular addicts -- the group that police said they
weren't going to target -- being questioned and handcuffed.

Rich said he talked to all the officers on the team about their goal in the
area.

"I said, 'I want you to be hard on the conduct, but I want you to remember
the addict is a human being.'"

In the next three months, both sides will be looking for evidence about
whether the police have been successful in targeting dealers but not
scaring addicts away from health services.