INSITE NO HIT WITH BEAT COPS: SURVEY

Of 86 Respondents, 59 Per Cent 'Strongly Opposed' To Safe-Injection Site

Vancouver beat cops have panned the city's safe-injection site.

A survey of patrol officers in the Downtown Eastside district has
found heavy opposition to Insite, the controversial site on Hastings
Street designed to give hard-drug users a safe place to shoot up.

More than 59 per cent responding to the detailed survey were strongly
opposed to Insite and a further 18 per cent were somewhat opposed,
Vancouver Police Union president Tom Stamatakis revealed Thursday.

He added that another majority of officers (53 per cent) saw the
opening of Insite as contributing to the deterioration of the neighbourhood.

"Only one per cent saw it as having had the effect of improving the
neighbourhood," Stamatakis said.

Less than 20 per cent of the officers reported being satisfied with
Insite staff, he noted.

Stamatakis said his union conducted the survey in June last year
because of claims from Insite supporters that crime and public
disorder in the Downtown Eastside had decreased as result of Insite,
set up six years ago as North America's first supervised-injection facility.

"The claims about Insite reducing crime and disorder have been, in
the opinion of the police officers I represent, very much
exaggerated," Stamatakis said.

The full survey results are to be released in the coming weeks, but
Stamatakis provided some key findings exclusively to The Province.

"Proponents of Insite always suggest that Vancouver police officers
support the site, which I've always asserted is not the case. And our
survey bears that out," he said.

Asked why it had taken so long to release the findings, Stamatakis
said compiling the results and reviewing them, along with related
research, had proved more complex than anticipated.

The high level of police dissatisfaction with Insite surprised even
Stamatakis: "I thought it would have been more mixed, to tell you the truth."

The police union sent out "comprehensive" questionnaires to some 170
front-line officers, he said. It received 86 responses, and many of
them were highly critical of the drug-injection facility.

Less than four per cent of those officers who responded believed the
injection site had had a positive impact, he said. And only six per
cent believed it had helped reduce such "public-disorder indicators"
as loitering in the area for illicit purposes.

Insite, which has been praised by everyone from social activists to
medical researchers and city politicians, is run by Vancouver Coastal
Health and the Portland Health Society. Between 2003 and 2008, it
operated under a special exemption from federal drug laws.

The federal Tory government refused to renew the exemption beyond
July of last year, but the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that laws
stopping it from operating were unconstitutional. This ruling has
been appealed by Ottawa to the B.C. Court of Appeal, and a decision
is expected imminently.

Vancouver Coastal Health spokeswoman Anna Marie D'Angelo disagreed
with the police criticism of Insite.

"With due respect to the police officers, there have been many, many
peer-reviewed studies into all aspects on Insite, and they show a
variety of beneficial effects," she said.

The studies, she noted, also showed there had been no resulting
increase in drug-related crime.

Stamatakis, meanwhile, took issue with the suggestion by Vancouver
medical researchers that crack addicts be provided with a
supervised-inhalation room. He said such "harm-reduction" methods,
including Insite itself, made little sense without a broader treatment program.