MORE POLICE, NOT NEEDLES, ARE WHAT DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE NEEDS

As Vancouver police Chief Jamie Graham acknowledged yesterday, our
crime-embedded city is not receiving the police services it should.

The reason? Our civic politicians' support for the war on drugs remains
about as lukewarm as their support for the war in Iraq.

That's to say world peace and politically safe hand-holding appear to be of
far more pressing concern to Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell and his COPE
cohort than protecting law-abiding citizens from thieves and thugs.

And the battalion of taxpayer-financed lobby groups advocating "harm
reduction" as the answer to the city's drug evils already seem to have won
a key public-relations battle over an out-gunned, out-manned -- and
scandal-rocked -- police department.

Witness these groups' brazen attacks on the sensible suggestion by Chief
Graham to launch a seriously overdue strike against downtown drug dealers.

Indeed, they clearly expect to be taken seriously with their bizarre claim
that hiring extra police officers to help patrol the Downtown Eastside, as
advocated by Graham, would actually encourage the spread of AIDS.

"We remain deeply concerned that the deployment of additional officers in
the Downtown Eastside will serve only to increase HIV transmission and
overdoses by driving drug users deeper into the Downtown Eastside's worst
hotels and back alleys, where syringes will be shared and other harms
exacerbated," says a letter to Campbell signed by the B.C. Persons with
AIDS Society, AIDS Vancouver and YouthCO AIDS Society.

Using that logic, we might as well order the police to beat a speedy
retreat from this battlefield and turn it over to roaming crack dealers to
plunder at their will. Which, of course, is virtually what is happening now.

As Graham's report to council makes clear, the Downtown Eastside is "a
community in crisis primarily due to the crime and disorder arising from
the drug abuse epidemic in the community." It is a disgrace to any city,
let alone one with world-class pretensions.

So is Campbell's contention (as voiced in a CBC report) that putting more
police into the area before introducing safe-injection sites would somehow
stop addicts from "entering into the health system."

Sure, Campbell wants to prove his point that safe-injection sites are the
ultimate weapon. But to suggest police postpone their efforts to clean up
this benighted neighbourhood, because of a doubtful harm-reduction scheme
serving only a small portion of drug users, is ludicrous.

It's as laughable as suggesting that parachuting free needles into Baghdad
would help win the war in Iraq.