50 OFFICERS TO TARGET DOWNTOWN DRUG TRADE

Temporary measure linked to launch of safe injection sites

A special police team aimed at cleaning up Vancouver's open drug market in
the Downtown Eastside is being pulled together, with up to 50 officers being
drawn from various areas for the new "city-wide enforcement" project.

The team, which hasn't yet been officially announced, is provoking concern
among community-policing advocates, whose offices will lose some of their
liaison officers.

But Vancouver police Inspector Doug LePard, who will be heading the new
team, said police are trying to create the new force while doing the least
damage to other public services.

The police objective is to give the new supervised injection sites for drug
addicts "the very best chance of success" and to work toward achieving one
of the main goals of the Vancouver Agreement, which is to end the open drug
market, he said Thursday in an interview with The Vancouver Sun.

"The health authority has specifically asked for increased police
enforcement to meet their needs," said LePard.

He stressed that the idea is not to clean out the market by driving dealers
into other communities, but to restore order in a "community that is in
distress."

He said the team is being called a city-wide enforcement team because it
will be working to ensure that problems aren't just dispersed to other
neighbourhoods.

The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority submitted its application this week
to Health Canada for approval to open Canada's first supervised injection
sites, one on 100-block East Hastings, directly across the street from the
city's largest open drug market, and another in the Dr. Peter Centre near
St. Paul's Hospital in the West End.

Health Canada has promised to process those applications within 60 days.

Both the sites and the policing effort are part of an attempt under the
Vancouver Agreement to improve the economic situation and the health of
those in the Downtown Eastside.

LePard wouldn't give a target date for when the team is supposed to start
operating, but several community policing offices say their officers have
already been reassigned and, according to others, they've been told the new
team will operate from April 1 to June 30.

LePard did confirm the team will only operate on a temporary basis, "because
we can't sustain it."

In the meantime, community-policing advocates are distressed about what they
see as a disproportionate number of officers being taken from their program.
Although officers for the team are being drawn from school liaison programs
and other regular areas of the police department, they say the 16-member
community-policing group is being hit disproportionately hard.

They're also concerned about the impact of the new police initiative.

"This is reminiscent to me of projects I have seen from the police in the
past," said Eileen Mosca, co-chairwoman of the Community Policing Advisory
Committee, who lives in the Commercial Drive area where there are increasing
difficulties with drug use. "I'm open to being convinced this one might
work."

But she said police had an operation called Project Swoop in the late 1980s
that ended up driving drug dealers to the Broadway and Fraser area, which
they found so comfortable they never left.

She also said she's concerned about the message being sent about community
policing and that it appears to be a transparent strategy to bolster the
police department's request for 44 more officers in this year's budget
negotiations.

"It's clear these projects are related to budget requests for more
manpower," said Mosca, emphasizing that she thinks Vancouver needs more
police, since it has the lowest per-capita policing level of any major city
in Canada.

But, she said, by taking so many of the community policing officers, "it
seems clear to me that they're giving us the message that we're just not
important."

LePard acknowledged that it's impossible to pull officers out of existing
programs without problems.

"There is going to be some pain, we recognize that. But there's important
work and then there's more important work at a particular time."

He was reluctant to give more details of the project because he said it is
just in the planning phase.

Police are also considering whether to create a new, fifth district out of
the Downtown Eastside in the city's policing plan for the city.

Currently, the city is divided into four policing districts, with the
Downtown Eastside being one part of District 2, which covers the entire
northeast sector of Vancouver.