WISDOM FROM THE STREET

When it comes to police efforts to clean up downtown, they have some
friends in unusual places.

While the debate over pre-approving next year's police budget raged
last week, it wasn't just business groups warning that police efforts
to beef up their presence downtown shouldn't be hampered by budgetary
constraints.

It turns out even some of the people causing the problems on our
inner-city streets back the blues.

The spectre of budget cuts prompted one former crack dealer to
contact the Sun with a warning that taking away the increased police
presence would "give the drug dealers and criminals the green light
to go back to the way it was before."

It would be "back to Square 1 again," says Tamara, who after 17
gritty years on the streets, homeless and trafficking drugs, is in a
unique position to know about such things.

Tamara (I'm not using her last name to protect her privacy) was one
of the people arrested and charged in "Operation Endeavour," an
undercover drug sweep in spring 2009.

After four months in jail, she joined the Calgary drug treatment
court program and says "it's changed my life completely."

The 31-year-old says she had been openly dealing crack and "using
hard" for a long time before she was finally charged with trafficking
15 months ago.

"If it was not for the increased police presence in the downtown
core, who knows how long it would have been before I was finally caught."

Tamara has been drug-free for almost a year now, is going back to
school to pursue a career and is going home to visit her family in a
small Alberta town for the first time in 17 years.

She admits she wasn't exactly a fan of the police before her trafficking bust.

"I was rude to them, I was nasty to them, I was ignorant."

She says she is now motivated to speak out from her unique
perspective because of the police officers she has come to respect.

"I just believe police need to know they're doing a good job and that
it does change people's lives.

"They're not told very often they're appreciated."

The increased police presence downtown made a difference for a
handful of other addicts arrested in the drug sweep, she says, but
"the rest of them pled out and got their jail time, just so they
could get back out on the street ... they don't do very much time."

Tamara continues to venture downtown on "a daily basis," for a
12-step program, where she passes the people still out on the streets.

"There's nothing I can do to change what they're doing and there's
nothing they can do to take me back out there."

Jonelle, 34, who was also accepted into the drug court program, had
been using and dealing crack for a decade,

"I was a menace to society," she says, admitting that before her
first arrest for trafficking she was no friend of the cops.

"I hated them .. but now that I've changed my life and my attitude,
I'm grateful they did what they did."

Jonelle is learning a trade and her three daughters, 17, 16 and 13,
"are back in my life."

It's illuminating, if somewhat ironic, to know it isn't just folks
from the suburbs who travel downtown for work, shopping and
entertainment who sing the praises of the police for their effort in the core.

"It is so much cleaner and so much safer to walk around," says Tamara.

"You're not constantly hounded as you walk down 7th Avenue. or
Stephen Avenue ... it's so much nicer."

Tamara explains she's speaking out because "I hope one day what I say
helps another addict."

Her advice to Calgary's finest?

"Continue to do clean sweeps for criminals."

The police need to know they've made a difference, she says.