COP SHOW'S GOOF FREES POT DEALER, STINGS LANDLADY

Critics Called It A Public-Relations Farce

They said To Serve and Protect, the Lower Mainland's weekly TV circus
of nightclub brawls, lippy teens and domestic disputes, was nothing
but pure entertainment.

They said it served no purpose and protected no one.

They couldn't have asked for better proof than a case that emerged out
of Burnaby last week. Several months after police pulled the plug on
the show, leaving addicted viewers with nothing but re-runs, the
operator of a major basement-grow operation has walked away a free
man. He can thank To Serve and Protect.

The crook's landlady, left with a $40,000 home-repair bill, says she's
furious at how our judicial system let her down.

``Mary'' -- she fears reprisals -- thought she was doing the sensible
thing when she rented out her house through an agency in March 1997.

``They called and said they were very good tenants,'' she recalls.
``It was a man, his wife and her sister, or something like that.''
Mary lived right around the corner and, while she never saw the wife
or sister, often exchanged courtesies with the man who had signed the
post-dated cheques.

Eight months later, she was driving home from work when she noticed a
crime unit in the drive.

``The officer explained that there was a grow operation in there,''
she says. ``When I walked in, it was devastating. Everything was
ripped up. The floors were jack-hammered, all these tanks were fixed
into it, the carpets were all ripped out, and in the walls and ceiling
there were holes everywhere. He had 300 plants in the basement.''

Her tenant had already fled when the drug squad burst through the door
- -- followed by a crew from To Serve and Protect.

But when he turned himself in a few days later, it seemed to be an
open-and-shut case. Mary was asked to appear in court last week to
identify him. She was, she says, looking forward to seeing justice
done. She had spent $40,000 on repairs and lost a further $14,000 in
rent.

``The money's not important,'' she insists. ``And it's not like I have
money to throw around. But they destroyed something I worked very hard
for.''

Then she got the call. ``They said don't bother coming to court,
because the charges have been stayed. Serve and Protect went into the
house after the police went in and that apparently infringes on his
rights. I was a little angry, to say the least.''

She says she doesn't believe that the camera crew jeopardized the case
- -- especially as the tenant had already fled the scene.

``Our judicial system failed,'' she says. ``These people went in and
destroyed someone else's property. They made big bucks out of it and
they got off because some lawyer or whoever found this little
technicality and said no, you can't charge him. It's
outrageous.''

She recently rented the house to someone else. She did the interviews
personally this time -- and followed the advice of the police in
asking her tenants to agree in writing for her to inspect the house
once every two months.

RCMP spokesman Cpl. Grant Learned says the Burnaby case was one of
several to be dropped as the result of a Vancouver ruling in which
charges were dismissed because a CBC camera crew had entered someone's
property without being named on the search warrant.

He says it was one of a number of reasons why police pulled out of To
Serve and Protect.

Meanwhile, he says, landlords should routinely monitor rental
properties and look for signs such as: Guard dogs, blacked-out windows
and tenants who appear to be unusually shy.