LOCATION, JUSTICE SYSTEM, BANKS MAKE VANCOUVER IDEAL PLACE FOR CRIME: RCMP

What makes Vancouver a great place to live is also what makes it a
good place for crime, one of the Lower Mainland's top cops told
municipal representatives and others at the Vancouver Board of Trade's
Metro forum.

Vancouver is one hour from the United States, "the largest illegal
drug-consuming nation in the world," said Peter German, district
commander for the Lower Mainland with the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police. It has one of the largest ports for trade with Asia in the
world, a large airport and excellent banks with branches around the
world including offshore locations, he told the forum.

B.C. also has a liberal criminal justice system and a fairly liberal
approach to illegal drugs. "On top of that we have a lot of diasporas,
strong ethnic communities which make this a place we want to live
[and] really make the Lower Mainland unique," German said. "But we
also have unique organized-crime trends in a lot of communities. And I
include the Caucasian community because we happen to be home to five
Hells Angels clubs, the largest number in one metropolitan area
anywhere in the world," he said.

Those characteristics make Vancouver and the Lower Mainland part of a
global, not local, crime scene. "If you go back 30 years this was
really a backwater in terms of crime," German said. "Crime was a very
local thing. Right now ... it is global."

The reason is drugs, not just marijuana but synthetic drugs such as
ecstasy, he said. B.C. produces large quantities of drugs for foreign
markets, mainly the U.S., German said. The fact that those drugs are
illegal gives rise to an entire community of organized crime groups
that compete for territory. "Gangs, drugs [and] organized crime are
fixtures here," German said. "Until illegal drugs go away, we're going
to have them."