A LOOK AT THE WORST BLOCK IN VANCOUVER

There are few signs of welcome and harmony along the 100 block of West
Hastings near the old Woodwards building, an area ravaged by fights and an
open drug trade.

It's 5 p.m. on a sunny weekday evening and traffic is streaming through
Vancouver's Hastings strip, taking commuters safely enclosed in buses and
mini-vans from the downtown towers to the eastern suburbs.

But on the block that is now considered the roughest in the city -- the 100
block of West Hastings -- business is just picking up. The crack dealers are
out, as they have been since before dawn. So are the crack buyers and the
young kids coming down to scare themselves with a taste of the street.

It used to be that the 100-block East Hastings had the reputation of being
the city's raunchiest location. But that has changed in the past year. The
escalating anarchy and open drug market of the 100-block West Hastings have
made the heroin users and dealers, drunks and battered-looking but
still-open businesses of the 100-block East Hastings seem neighbourly and
civilized by comparison.

This is the block where police are currently considering the
new-to-Vancouver idea of installing permanent surveillance cameras in an
aggressive attempt to get the street under control, and where the city is
hunting for ways to get businesses -- and civilization -- to return.

It is also the block that everyone acknowledges has to be one of the first
to be fixed if the Downtown Eastside is going to be salvaged.

This evening, it's not clear how that will be done.

Dark-haired young men mill in front of the pawnshop and convenience store at
the eastern corner of the block, at Abbot street, muttering "want any" or
flicking their eyes up to people weaving among them. In moves as intricate
as any minuet, they offer, negotiate, take a lump of crack cocaine out of
their mouths, pass it over, and exchange money in seconds.

One seller, wearing a white and black football shirt with EX on the front,
will later be identified as a 33-year-old refugee claimant from Honduras. He
arrived in Canada six months ago, he's living in Burnaby and he has one
prior arrest for trafficking in New Westminster. His partner is a younger
man from Honduras, here only two months, with a Carolina Street address in
Vancouver's east side.

At the periphery of this group on the east corner are the young kids. One
boy with a pair of clearly stolen blue track pants, the tag still on them,
offers them to the group. Two other kids -- both looking about 15 -- offer
them a Lakers shirt. All are turned down, but they keep hanging around.

One of the young boys, a kid with blond hair that falls in a short, precise
blunt cut and dressed all in white, is warned by police around 8 p.m. to get
out of the area or he'll end up in youth detention. At 11:30 p.m., he's
still there. With sweat beading on his fuzzy upper lip, he says politely
he's come down here a few times in the last while. He's 16, lives in
Whalley, goes to school at North Surrey. All he's doing is waiting for a
friend.

And then there are the "regular people" who still venture down the street.
The Chinese women with their shopping waiting at the bus stop. Men with
laptops on their way to nearby parking lots. Girls in white halter-tops and
backpacks and guitars who steam obliviously through the pack. And the
middle-aged cruiseship couples and tourists who look first confused and then
apprehensive as they come down the street from Cambie, wondering exactly
when it was that they crossed the boundary into hell.

From his hiding place nearby, Clive Milligan watches it all.

Milligan is part of tonight's delta shift -- the Vancouver police evening
team whose job it is to concentrate on problem spots in District 2, an area
that covers the northeast corner of the city from Cambie out to Boundary
Road.

On the first part of this shift, he and the 12-member team are concentrating
on 100 West.

"We'll get out there now because it looks like the fishing's pretty good,"
he radios to his team, observing the high level of activity on the street.

"We're picking off this block because it's been a thorn in our side," says
Milligan, who will spend the first 90 minutes of his day watching the corner
as obsessively as an air-traffic controller, spotting drug pick-ups, trades
and dumps almost invisible to casual observers.

It's his job to identify those selling before the rest of the undercover
team jumps in to take them down, so that Crown prosecutors don't end up
losing a case because police searched someone without "reasonable" grounds
to suspect that person was dealing.

The team takes pleasure in its successes -- the time, for example, that they
nabbed a large group by having a pair of officers come in from each end of
the block and then having another group jump off a B.C. Transit bus
(commandeered farther up the street).

But the more common reality is that it's gruelling work for only a few
charges that can be made to stick. The sellers -- young, non drug-taking men
who commute from outside the area to sell to the addicts -- are quick to
spot undercover officers, whistling and signalling to each other at the
first sighting. They hold the drugs in their mouths so they can swallow them
at the first sign of trouble. Or they throw them away as undercover officers
rush in.

On this night, by the time Milligan's team has pulled up in an unmarked car,
jumped out onto the sidewalk and pinned EX and his partner facedown on the
sidewalk, they have nothing on them. At a takedown at Pigeon Park, the team
nabs one guy who has six rocks on him, but Milligan didn't see that man
actually passing drugs, only accepting some change. A trafficking charge
might not hold because of that. The best they do for the night is the arrest
outside the West Hotel of a man Milligan sees dealing and who is found with
lots of crack when he's pinned.

Mostly, though, they take their nabs for a ride out of the area, hope
they'll give up selling for the night, put a scare into everyone else on the
street, and keep the tide of drug-dealing from washing any farther up
Hastings.

For those who work and live in the area, the situation has become
unbearable.

"We are feeling really desperate," says Frank Gilbert, of the Downtown
Eastside Residents Association. "There's not a day goes by that two or three
residents don't come and say, 'What are you doing about this?' Nobody goes
out after supper any more."

Ron Cassidy, who works every night at the Salvation Army's Crosswalk shelter
mid-block, says it went crazy about a year ago.

And, because the drug being sold is crack, it brings a whole, new, edgier,
more dangerous feel to the place.

There are fights in Victory Park next door, either between rival Hispanic
gangs -- the Salvadorans and Guatemalans controlled the street until the
Hondurans moved in about nine months ago -- or between the Hispanics and
biker groups that come in from their local hangout to get rid of them.
People carry knives. And anyone who walks down the street, no matter how
prissy looking, is offered drugs.

Ben Keil shut his business on the block -- a clothing and outdoor-gear store
called Big Foot Outdoors -- two months ago, tired of the crowd of open drug
dealers standing at the door of his store, The last straw was when some of
his employees were threatened with concrete bricks.

"Before, there were drug deals all over Vancouver, but it was in the side
streets and the back lane," he says. "Now it's like a flea market."

Keil feels the police higher-ups have given up on his block.

"Clive and his team are good, but only one fist does nothing."

There are some successes and attempts at getting control. The city's chief
licence inspector, Paul Teichroeb, recently got the Regal Place Hotel on the
block shut down, which removed some of the drug traffickers. He's also
suspended the licences of two stores on the block in the last year.

District 2 Staff Sergeant Doug MacKay-Dunn is adding new street and
motorcycle patrols to the Hastings strip, starting Monday. His officers are
also warning people shooting up in the lanes behind Hastings that they have
to move their rigs inside because the new policy, starting next week, is
that they won't tolerate any more drug-dealing and drug-taking in public.
And he's seriously considering the surveillance-camera idea.

The city is preparing to take the unusual measures of offering rent
subsidies and consulting help to get businesses to open up in the block.

But the Woodward's department store, which precipitated the block's decline
when it closed, is still sitting empty. It's supposed to be redeveloped as a
condo and retail complex, but construction has stalled as the developer
negotiates with the city over permit requirements. Project manager Terry
Partington says it's unlikely the two-year construction project will start
before the fall, if then.

The one surprising fact about the street is that relatively few people who
visit the area but don't live there are attacked or robbed. Gilbert says
one street guy even turned in a wallet with $80 in it.

Gail Fuoco, a 46-year-old north Burnaby woman who does shift work downtown,
calmly waits for the bus at 11:30 p.m. the night Milligan's team is working.

It's creepy down here, she admits as she smokes. But she's been working in
the area for nine years. No one bothers her. She just tells the guys who
approach her that she's not interested in drugs. And that they should stop,
too.

Checked-by: "Rolf Ernst"