POLICE FOCUS ON VICE LEAVES VICTIMS OF REAL CRIME ON THEIR OWN

Ask most people whose house has ever been broken into and they'll tell you,
the call to the insurance company was the only one worth making. A call to
the police may bring an officer around to take a report, but it rarely
brings the satisfaction of getting your property back, or compensation for
any vandalism, or seeing the criminals go to jail.

In fact, a Toronto lawyer recently told me that he had arrived at work one
day to find two bullet holes in the glass door to his office. He called the
police, but was told that they wouldn't send an officer to investigate.
This sort of thing "happens all the time," the officer said on the phone.

Another friend told me he'd been the victim of identity theft, probably an
inside job by someone working at his bank. Among other things, there was a
withdrawal of $16,000 from his line of credit. When he called police, he
was told they don't investigate frauds against individuals if they're under
$250,000 or, for businesses, under $1 million.

These troubling anecdotes are corroborated by statistics. A 1997 study by
Statistics Canada revealed that only 24 per cent of property crimes are
ever cleared by police. For breaking and entering, the rate is 15 per cent.

Citizens faced with this kind of police unresponsiveness are turning in
droves to other means of protecting themselves. Sales of home security
systems have skyrocketed. Gated communities with private security guards,
long common in the U.S., are gaining a foothold in Canada. Retailers are
installing surveillance cameras everywhere. Banks are exploring a variety
of ways to prevent credit card fraud -- from fingerprint identification to
retinal scans.

In other words, crime prevention -- once considered an undisputed function
of government -- is steadily, quietly, without any fanfare, being taken
over by the private sector.

Meanwhile, how are tax-funded police officers spending their time? We get a
hint in a recent national newspaper headline: "54 people charged in betting
crackdown."

We get another hint in a case where a pair of undercover policemen attended
a Marilyn Manson concert dressed like rock fans, in white face makeup and
black wigs. They cajoled and intimidated a 14-year-old boy into parting
with $10 worth of marijuana -- a third of the stash he intended to smoke
himself. An appeal court eventually threw out the boy's drug trafficking
conviction due to police entrapment. Meanwhile, not only had the police
wasted a lot of manpower engineering this silly episode, but someone in the
Crown prosecutor's office also thought this boy's dastardly deed worth some
prosecutorial resources.

As citizens increasingly find it necessary to take over the job of crime
prevention in their homes and workplaces, the primary job that's being left
for government police is vice prevention. Drugs, gambling, smuggling and
prostitution will eventually become the raison d'etre of the boys in blue
- -- if they aren't already.

What do these offences have in common? The participants on both sides of
each deal are participating willingly, voluntarily. Nobody considers
himself a "victim" of the transaction. The only person who objects is the
state.

Police argue that these vices are increasingly controlled by organized
crime, leading ultimately to violence and murder. Therefore, the logic
goes, we must pursue petty vices in order to prevent deaths.

But gangland turf wars occur only when we transform vices into crimes. The
Prohibition-era liquor trade was steeped in violence, too. However, now
that alcohol can be sold legally, Molson's and Sleeman's aren't shooting it
out in the streets. Instead they're respectable citizens, listed on the
stock exchange. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is the legalization of
victimless crime, not the zealous prosecution of it, that prevents vice
from escalating into crime.

But don't tell that to the cops or law-and-order politicians. They demand
ever-increasing funding, and ever-increasing powers, to deal with problems
they actually help to create. They're willing to risk transforming the
country into a police state, apparently for our own good. Have they never
pondered the fact that urine tests conducted in prisons invariably show
that even in those microcosms of the ultimate police state, there's always
a good percentage of the population that manages to get stoned?

Let's hope taxpayers eventually start questioning why they should have to
pay twice for the crime prevention they really want -- once through their
taxes to the ineffectual police department, and a second time to the
company that monitors their home security service. Maybe then they'll start
refusing to pay, both with their dollars and their liberties, for ventures
that are beginning to look primarily like make-work projects for police.