'It's a Continuous Battle'

Ottawa Police Chief Vern White Talks to the Citizen's Chris Cobb
About Crime, Crack and the Grip of Addiction.

You have said that one of your biggest surprises when you became
chief was the extent of Ottawa's crack problem.

I was shocked by it. I had Iived here from 2003 to 2005 working for
the RCMP. Like a typical government Ottawan, I worked downtown, went
home (to) Richmond and would maybe go to the Market occasionally for lunch.

When I came back in 2007, I couldn't believe the amount of addiction
I saw on the streets. I did some drivealongs with the Street Crime
Unit and started to see the gravity of the crack cocaine situation
and the challenges on three fronts: Addiction, mental health and homelessness.

When I spoke to my officers, the frustration they expressed over our
ability to do anything about it was overwhelming.

From downtown and some of suburbia, our biggest complaints were
about petty crime. People complained to me at a public forum about
crack addicts in front of their yards, having to pick up needles in
their yards and people stealing from their cars. Minor items
typically. One woman told me she couldn't leave her lawn chair out at
night because someone would have sex on it.

The root cause was drug use. It's a community issue but also a safety issue.

So we could do something about that.

We also need to identify the real issues. One of the real issues for
me is access to treatment. We had Harvest House, which does a
tremendous job with its one-year program, but we could fill it a
hundred times a week.

One of my first speeches was at the mayor's breakfast in June 2007
when I said that a drug treatment centre would be one of the greatest
crime prevention tools we could build. I tried to re-focus the
community on drug addiction, not just a health issue -- as a crime
issue, a safety issue, a security issue.

Statistics from other cities tell you that a crack addict on the
street will commit between four and eight crimes a day. If we take a
crack addict off the street for a 90-day program how many crimes have
we prevented? Some addicts have corrected me -- said that some days
they have committed 20 or 30 crimes.

I spoke to the Rideau Wood annual general meeting last year. One guy
interrupted my speech and said his minimum was 20 crimes a day --
often minor theft, reaching into a car to steal a CD off the dash,
but still a crime.

So my focus was twofold: We'd do our strict enforcement, and the
Street Crime Unit does that. We are arresting traffickers. Typically,
we arrest almost no crack users.

I could take you for a drive right now and we could arrest 10 crack
users in 30 minutes, but that's not our goal. Our goal is to stop the
trafficking, which will ultimately reduce the access addicts have so
instead of using 15 or 20 times a day they'll be using five times a
day, reduce the amount of crime they commit and perhaps force them
into thinking, "I do need some help."

How do you define a trafficker?

Someone who gives or sells crack cocaine either for something else or
for money.

If you give me crack cocaine and I give you a bottle of whisky,
you're a trafficker. If you give me a rock of crack for $25, you're a
trafficker.

My focus is to reduce trafficking in certain areas, which is why,
when they are released, we ask (the court for) conditions banning
them from locations where they have been targeting clientele. We
don't want them by the Mission or Sally Ann. We want to reduce their access.

We push as many as we can into the Drug Treatment Court, but it has
nowhere near the capacity we need. People argue that there are better
uses of resources.

A Crown (attorney) who shall remain nameless disagreed with spending
$100,000 to put someone through the Drug Treatment Court. My answer
is that it costs $125,000 to keep someone in jail for a year. Which
is the better use of resources? If at the end of the year someone is
straight, sober and getting on with their life, then that's a great
expenditure of $100K compared to putting them in jail (for) $125,000
and have most of them coming out still addicted.

How successful have you been?

I didn't think we could solve the problem overnight. Until you have
open access to drug treatment, you can't solve the problem. Where
we've reduced the level of street crime, the public's perception of
safety in certain areas has increased. Overall, people are probably
safer, although some of it is perception and maybe not reality. They
feel like they're safer and act like their safer.

Two youth treatment facilities, part of the (Support, Treatment,
Education, Prevention) program will be open at Maison fraternite, in
the fall, and at Meadow Creek Farm, Kanata, in a few months. (STEP
has raised $4.8 million toward its $6-million goal.)

Drug treatment centres for youth are tremendous, but the other
success story is that we will have every high school in the city with
a drug counsellor. Before, we had fewer than half. So everyone in the
non-private schools will have access to a drug counsellor. That's huge.

What will be the school counsellors' role?

Most young people will make the right choices when they have the
information. Our goal is to keep kids off drugs -- prescription
parties, the ecstasy, crack, crystal meth. We can tell kids that 60
per cent of crystal meth addicts are addicted after their first day
and 60 per cent or more of crack addicts become addicted within the
first 24 hours. Kids might then decide to do some other drugs but
given the right information, I think they'll say, "No. I don't want
to be on that." Our goal is to keep them off drugs. And if they get
on drugs, to get them off. But we're a long way from that, a long way.

Obviously you feel we need more treatment centres.

If every addict in Ottawa came forward today and said, 'You're right,
I need treatment and I want in today' we'd have to fill all the gyms.
I was told there are about 6,000 intravenous drug users in this city
and probably half or more crack addicts are not intravenous. They
smoke it and don't use needles. So it doesn't include them. And it
doesn't include OxyContin users.

So what's our true number of addicts?

I have no idea but it's huge. At least 10,000.

Your officers periodically do sweeps of the Market area and arrest
people. What benefit, short and long term, do those raids have?

Short term, some of the communities we do sweeps in tell us they feel
safer. The mission notices a reduction in the amount of crack
available to users, and they notice users become a little crankier.
So in the short term people will use less often and might need to
commit only two crimes instead of five.

Vanier will tell you that some of our sweeps have helped them get
moving on some of their community rebuilding, which has been
tremendously successful. Lowertown might say the same thing. So in
the short term it means community members feel they can take some
control of their communities. With crack addicts, needles and
everything else around them, they wouldn't leave their houses.

Long term, there are two goals. One is to get the public to
understand and recognize what the real problems in our city are. I'm
trying to raise $6 million for drug treatment centres, so I need them
to recognize and understand the problem.

Second, the problems downtown are all our problems. They don't stay
in one area of the city. There isn't a 15-year-old in any high school
in the city who can't buy drugs if they want to buy them. So it's a
City of Ottawa problem.

I hope long term it also draws more government resources to provide
better access to mental health treatment, addiction treatment and
homes for the homeless. If you look at successes in other cities and
other countries, it's the ability to provide multi-faceted
approaches. New York's Common Ground model is a success story because
it provides homes, care of some sort -- counselling and treatment.

I've heard many complaints of users around the Market who get
harm-reduction paraphernalia -- stems, etc. -- from the community
health centre vans and then have them smashed or confiscated by
police officers who have the vans under surveillance. What is the
point of that?

We never target harm-reduction vans. If we did, we would need 10
officers following them around arresting users. We don't arrest users
unless (undercover officers) have bought from them and there is
trafficking involved. But if we find traffickers going to the
vehicles, we (don't stop pursuing them) because they are at a
harm-reduction van. There are no safe havens.

What's your view of these harm-reduction strategies?

I'm not a supporter of the crack pipe program. I have yet to see any
evidence it does what it is purported to do. Sitting around a table,
some of these initiatives make good sense. Once you drop them in the
middle of the street, I'm not sure they do.

But I'm not a doctor, I'm a cop. I've seen video footage of addicts
sharing and have spoken to addicts who say they share.

But I am a supporter of the needle-exchange program. It has been
successful in reducing some of the spread of HIV and hep C. And I'm a
supporter of the methadone clinics. They provide an alternative to an
addiction that otherwise is impossible to escape.

Crack addiction is at its most obvious in the Market area but many
people don't realize that it is also a suburban problem affecting
middle-class Ottawans whose financial situation and job security
enables to stay above the street culture and to hide their addiction.
Is it possible or desirable to police that?

The problem of drug use and addiction was never confined just to the
ByWard Market. We can go to any school in the city and seize ecstasy,
cocaine, and in a number, crack cocaine.

Crack houses, where drugs are dealt or consumed, can have a terrible
impact on neighbourhoods or high-rise communities. How do you deal
with that problem?

We will visit these places dozens of times before we ever get to the
position of being able to extricate the people. The landlord has to
care. It might not be a crack house but a place where people are
partying all the time and its spilling out onto the street. So they
aren't all the typical crack houses you see on TV.

The police ... are just one of the players.

Vanier has done a lot. I don't know if there's a community in the
city that cares more about changing -- they are focused on helping
themselves. Kudos to them.

Westboro Mechanicsville is a perfect example of a rough place to a
transition of what it is today. It's now a sought-after community to live in.

We have seen tremendous improvement in Ledbury-Banff where
Neighborhood Watch has been helpful.

We now have a focus on Carlington area. There are community concerns
around prostitution and drug use, so it is a concern of ours.
Lowertown and Vanier will continue to be a priority.

It is relatively easy to arrest and charge a small-time street dealer
who is likely selling a little crack to feed his or her own habit.
But how successful are police at getting to the higher echelons of
the drug trade?

It takes a lot more resources -- sometimes hundreds of thousands of
dollars to get to some of those targets.

They're not easy. They didn't get to where they are overnight and
they know how to stay far enough away from the police so someone else
gets picked up and they don't. It's a lots work -- undercover agents,
wiretaps authorizations. All those things take a lot of resources and
cost a lot of money.

Will this city ever be rid of crack?

Of course not. It isn't a war against drugs it's a continuous battle.

Addicts will tell you the same thing. They are in a battle and we are
part of the battle, too. I've yet to meet a young person who says
they can't wait to be an addict. I've yet to meet an addict who says
they enjoy being one.

When you talk to smokers who've tried 10 times to quit -- and they're
still spending $35 on two or three packs of cigarettes. They can't
quit so it puts into some perspective how difficult it must be for an
addicts who don't have $35 but are spending $75 or $100 or more on
crack cocaine.