BY ALL MEANS, CHIEF HEED, TAKE THE NEXT JOB

Kashmir Heed's 15 minutes of fame as West Vancouver police chief
deserves to be over.

Visible accomplishments: New uniforms. New paint on cars: POLICE in
huge letters. Gee.

More substantially, Heed banned Tasers, updated communications and
statistical analysis, targets a kind of issue-of-the-month goal that
sounds like New Age policing. But does he catch more criminals? (Put
aside this week's arrest of a WVPD officer -- Vancouver cops did that.)

Heed cares squat about West Vancouver as such. It's just a springboard
to his larger ambitions. Read on. Now he's all but said so.

Heed got the West Van job on the rebound from a failed bid to become
Vancouver's chief and over the heads of long-service WVPD staff, and
after members of the West Vancouver Police Board had been shuffled to
remove a couple of supporters of fired Chief Scott Armstrong. They
were replaced with members more amenable to West Van mayor and police
board chairwoman Pam Goldsmith-Jones -- Heed's loyal backer.

A well-sourced view was that other police officers, at least one
out-of-province, checked the job but backed off when they learned how
Scott Armstrong had been treated.

Sworn in at a ceremony almost impossible in time and place for any but
select guests to attend, Heed proceeded to mouth off in all directions.

Heed's espousal of his big issue, police department amalgamation on
the North Shore or wherever, chilled even Goldsmith-Jones -- an
advocacy properly left to the police board.

Last Friday this paper headlined: Drugs Rampant in WV Says Police
Chief. The story quoted Heed that there's proportionally more illegal
drug use among West Vancouver youth than anywhere in the Lower
Mainland, including inner-core Vancouver.

In the stilted jargonspeak that he sometimes affects, Heed concernedly
said: "The frequency of use in this cohort was far greater than I
experienced elsewhere."

Hypocrisy, chutzpah don't come sliced thicker. The Drug Abuse
Resistance Education (DARE) program in West Vancouver schools was
killed early, and very personally, by Kash Heed.

DARE wasn't perfect. But ending it sent alert teenagers a big, fat
message: Parents, police, schools, the community no longer cared much
about kids' drug abuse, or shrugged it off as unstoppable.

Moving along, Heed unveiled the Vancouver-imitating Operation
Safeguard -- more hype, more marketing -- aimed at rousting gang
members out of West Vancouver bars and restaurants. Of which, in a
town where the sidewalks are carefully rolled up after 8 o'clock,
there are few.

Has it worked? Who knows? I did see a Porsche 911 parked at a fine
West Van restaurant a couple of months ago.

Constant Reader knows what this observer thinks of Heed playing
psychologist/psychiatrist after Insp. Bob Fontaine and Staff Sgt. Doug
Bruce, on sick leave after stressful ordeals surrounding the drunk
driving conviction of Const. Lisa Alford, were caught by the "gotcha"
telejournalism of a CTV news "exclusive."

All would agree it's a tangled affair still to be unknotted, and the
pair may be ruled accountable by an upcoming inquiry. But this
observer, in contact with both men, strongly rejects Heed's
implication -- "I'll leave it up to you and your readers who may have
viewed the (broadcast) last night to determine if they are well enough
to attend a hearing" -- as way off base and beyond his competence.

All of the above pales in light of Heed's interview in another North
Vancouver newspaper before Christmas.

The story said Heed had found "an entrenched culture in the (West Van)
police force that he says verged on corruption," and that "I had to
remove senior officers from positions where they would negatively
influence the changes. . . . I had to blast away that bunker mentality."

Any surprise that the West Vancouver Police Association -- all its
members tarred by the Heed brush -- lashed out at his comments, as the
News reported, as "reckless, defamatory and baseless"?

Heed -- this is a 30-odd-year police veteran and top police
administrator, for God's sake -- then explained to News reporter James
Weldon that he didn't mean corrupt in the criminal sense. He meant as
in "a corrupt program on your computer."

Believe that? Then I have two bridges to sell you, one slightly
damaged by flames.

It's a pattern: Heed and Goldsmith-Jones continue to try to justify
Scott Armstrong's expensive, messy and, for many, unpopular dismissal
- -- which may have accounted for some of the 60 per cent of the votes
cast against the mayor in November.

Of course Heed has his supporters on the force. Not surprisingly, some
owe their promotions to him. Others lost out. Sucking up to and
tearing down the chief are a given in all cop shops. They're more
politicized than Parliament.

Heed is also quoted as saying: "I don't know how long I'll be in
policing," that already "levels of government have come calling." He
mused that his future may lie in "higher level policy."

Translation: The West Van chief's job may not have been intended as much
more than a whistlestop in his ambitions, his style being to fix a problem
and then move on to a fresh challenge.

Be my guest, chief. Be this citizen's guest.

All that said, there were West Van citizens who agreed that their
police force before Heed's arrival needed cleaning up, and forcefully
said so -- maybe with some influence.

One firm critic of the pre-Heed WVPD is believed to have been
alienated after a member of his family in the force failed to meet
standards and was let go. Another, Chris Myburgh -- a certified
general accountant whose company, unusually, has phone and mail box
numbers but offers no street address -- repeatedly e-mailed me two or
three years ago, alleging corrupt conduct and cover-up by senior West
Vancouver police officers.

Myburgh's difficulty apparently began when he was charged with a
lane-change violation. In April 2002, he spoke to the legislature's
special committee to review the police complaint process about his
frustrations, including unreturned phone calls to the bureaucracy. He
testified: "An example of a letter that I thought they would be under
duty to respond to was a recent complaint letter about an
investigation of a police department. They hadn't answered my original
letter. They sent me a form 1 and pretended that what I was saying was
something else . . . and (were) not treating it as a complaint that
included (then-West Vancouver police chief Grant) Churchill. They only
sent it to Police Chief Churchill; they didn't send it to the police
board. . . . They've never responded to that letter. I keep on trying
to prod them into responding, and they just don't respond at all."

Concerning harassment, Myburgh told the committee: "The particular
constable involved has threatened to set his dog on me. . . . He stops
me arbitrarily and detains me arbitrarily from driving my car on the
pretence of drunk-driving checks. Some of these were actually laid in
evidence . . . when he accused me of changing lanes without
indicating. A North Vancouver justice of the peace actually determined
that the West Vancouver police constable had lied in court under oath."

After his many e-mails I invited Myburgh to meet me and bring evidence
to support his serious, on the surface libellous, allegations. He
declined. On the phone Monday he said I had seemed to disbelieve him,
and that he had construed it as "a personal attack." No, my
journalistic obligation was to check his claims. He said the issue is
now behind him. Finally, Myburgh feels vindicated by the fate of the
former police regime.

So that's something of the other side.