SENDING DRUG PROBLEM TO CITY HALL

Flash!

The Vancouver police department has discovered that dangerous addictive
drugs called "cocaine" and "heroin" are being sold on the streets of the
Downtown Eastside by people who call themselves "drug dealers." Police are
now engaged in a full scale campaign to rid our streets of this scourge!
Good luck to our brave men and women in blue!

Excuse me, but what in hell is going on?

Why has Vancouver police chief Jamie Graham decided to blitz the Downtown
Eastside with foot patrols, motorcycles and -- a weird touch, this --
officers on horseback? With all those nags on the beat, Hastings Street is
starting to take on the air of St. Petersburg circa 1905, with the Carnegie
Library standing in for the Winter Palace. Give those mounted cops sabres
and you could re-enact the Revolution. Cossacks, mow the drug-addled
Bolsheviks down!

And then there was that little show on camera Tuesday, the one with a rap
sheet as a prop. To demonstrate the persistence of the problem police face
down there, an officer dramatically unfolded the arrest record of one of
the perps they had caught during the campaign -- a computer printout so
long it accordioned to the ground.

These are the kind of repeat offenders we police have to deal with, was the
little show's message -- and what you, the long-suffering public, have to
put up with!

Well gosh, officer, any cub reporter who has spent any time in the Downtown
Eastside has seen those mile-long rap sheets before, and has seen them for
the last 15 years. That the judicial system is a revolving door when it
comes to drug-related offences is nothing new to the media; it is not even
a revelation for the public.

So why the sudden realization that, in the earnest words of Graham, the
Downtown Eastside drug trade "is a blight on this particular city and this
wonderful neighbourhood"? Why have police, after all these years, decided
now to do their "best to ensure it stops"? Is Graham's new-found resolve
the product of finally having a chance to look out his window? ("Hey!
There's people dealing drugs out there! Why wasn't I told about this!")

Perhaps it was a confluence of events. The force has suffered a series of
embarrassments in the last year, from the public relations beating it took
over the Pickton investigation -- which will probably inspire an inquiry --
to the beatings Vancouver cops allegedly doled out to itinerants.

And in Graham, the force has a new chief striving to polish up the force's
tarnish, and give it his own shine. Graham also finds himself in an odd
relationship with Mayor Larry Campbell. Graham beat Campbell out for the
police chief's job, but now finds himself, in effect, subordinate to him.

Lugging all that baggage on their brawny backs, the force approached city
council Tuesday night with a request for an additional $2.3 million for
2003, so they might pay for the staffing overtime needed to fund the
force's new "enforcement initiative" for the Downtown Eastside.

Part of that initiative started Monday -- thus the appearance of foot
patrols, motorcycles and cavalry in the neighbourhood. The initiative,
supposedly, was designed to be the enforcement part of the city's Four
Pillars approach to drug control.

Problem is, the other three pillars are not yet in place -- most
especially, the safe injection sites Campbell and the COPE council have
been promising from Day One.

So when the cops started rousting the cokeheads and junkies out of the bars
and hotels Monday, the cokeheads and junkies did what all aggrieved
citizens do when wanting to make a complaint.

They went to city hall.

About two dozen residents of the Downtown Eastside crammed into the council
chambers -- some of them carrying signs that read "Police Pogrom Must Stop"
and "Stick Your Phoney Four Pillars Up Your Police Chief" -- and just as
the city's finance managers started to go over the police funding request,
they erupted, screaming at Campbell, berating the police and bringing the
council meeting to a complete, chaotic halt. It lasted for about a
half-hour. Campbell looked alternately bemused, stony, angry and bored, but
let the screamers vent until they ran out of steam.

Then he had to listen to a schoolmarm lecture from Ann Livingstone, project
coordinator with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. While pleading
for the removal of the police stormtroopers and the immediate establishment
of a safe injection site, I believe she may have accused council of
sponsoring genocide. It was quite a show, and probably not what Campbell
would have preferred to sit through Tuesday afternoon.

"None of us can believe," she said, "this is happening to a COPE council!"

Nor could I. Six months in office and already Larry Campbell and his COPE
council are accused of being mass murderers.

Was this what Chief Graham was hoping to do by chasing the drug problem out
of the Downtown Eastside?

Send it down to Cambie and 12th?