POLICE VOICE CONCERNS

In 1986, Sgt. Dale Orban was a six-year constable with the Regina police
when a routine search of a drug house turned his life into a prolonged and
stressful waiting game.

"My part was to go and secure the bathroom area," Orban recalled Thursday.
"As I was running by a table where four people were fixing, I felt a pain
on the top of my left hand."

In the bathroom, he saw the blood and realized he had been pricked --
inadvertently, he thinks, -- by the addicts' shared needle. With HIV a new
and misunderstood threat, Orban spent the next six months waiting for his
blood test to come back from a laboratory and pondering his own mortality.

"It's the worst. Every day, every minute of every day, you're sitting there
thinking, 'Am I going to be the first officer in Regina to be
contaminated?' " He wondered if he was prepared to go on living with AIDS.

He personally tracked down the four users and asked them to get tested.
They did, and their tests, combined with his, confirmed that he was not
infected.

One Ottawa officer was not so lucky: she contracted HIV while on the job in
the 1990s.

"Sometimes they spit at you and say 'I've got HIV or Hep C.' It can be used
as a weapon," Orban said.

The issue of on-the job infection was one of two issues municipal police
addressed during their first annual "lobby day" at the legislature.

Eight representatives from the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers
met MLAs, including Justice Minister Chris Axworthy. Federation president
Evan Bray said nothing was promised during the brief meeting.

The officers want the Justice Department to bring in legislation that
requires someone to undergo a blood test if their bodily fluids contaminate
an officer during a criminal act.

Similar legislation is in place in Ontario, said Bray, a Regina police
officer. "This is in one province already. It's not breaking new ground."

Bray acknowledged the debate will raise concerns about civil liberties and
privacy, as it has elsewhere. "That is something that has to be weighed on
the back of this... Should there be some kind of peace of mind for our
officers?"

Infection by blood or spit from suspects and victims alike poses a daily
threat for police officers, Bray said. Officers who think they've been
infected must take a three-month regimen of drugs with side-effects ranging
from nausea to liver damage, he said.

The federation also wants to know when the government will fulfill former
Premier Roy Romanow's 1999 promise to fund 200 new officers around the
province.

"Right now we are three years after the promise was made and 71 officers
have been supplied by the province, which leaves us 129 officers short,"
Bray said.

If those officers don't arrive in the next year, the federation would at
least like to see a detailed plan to hire them within the "next two or
three years."