ODD SQUAD'S MAN OUT OF POLICE WORK

It was a unique undercover police probe called Project
Oldtimer.

Now the cop who posed as an old man to catch thieves preying on the
elderly in the Downtown Eastside last year has become that "oldtimer."

After more than 27 years with the Vancouver Police Department, Const.
Al Arsenault has called it a career. His last day was Sunday, when he
took one last stroll through the Downtown Eastside with his longtime
partner Sgt. Toby Hinton.

"The hardest block was walking the 100-block East Hastings, walking
towards the Carnegie Centre. I've walked that block thousands of times
and it was very emotionally draining."

At 53 and having served 27 years, Arsenault has reached what police
call "the 80 factor"-an officer's age plus years of service. Arsenault
can retire without receiving any penalties to his pension.

But that, he said, isn't the sole reason he's turning in his
badge.

"I can still wheel and deal and walk the walk and talk the talk, but I
just felt I've had an impact on policing and accomplished the things I
wanted to accomplish."

Arsenault wants to advance his academic career. With bachelor's
degrees in science and education, he wants to pursue a master's degree
in criminology.

Teaching is a possibility, he said, but he also wants to keep working
with the police's Odd Squad film production team. He also has "a half
a dozen books in me," he added.

Arsenault is best known for his work with the Odd Squad, which
produced the film Through a Blue Lens in 1999. It chronicled the lives
of addicts in the Downtown Eastside and is now shown in schools across
Canada.

That work, along with the formation of the Odd Squad, inspired a
television movie about Arsenault, Hinton and the handful of officers
who comprise the team.

A camera was also used last January to capture Arsenault disguised as
a disabled old man in Project Oldtimer. The martial arts expert
volunteered to be human bait for thieves beating and robbing seniors.

He pretended to be asleep in alleys near Carrall and East Hastings,
while his cover team of officers kept watch. It took less than 45
minutes to be robbed on both nights of the project.

"One guy was so close to me, I could smell the crack [cocaine] on his
breath," Arsenault told the Courier in a March 2005 feature about
undercover police work. "I was thinking, 'What if the guy decides to
slit my throat?' My heart was pumping pretty fast."

Arsenault joined the Vancouver police in 1979 and worked in various
squads, including the youth services car, strike force and the drug
education and enforcement team. He spent almost half his career in the
Downtown Eastside, where he got to know the addicts, sex trade
workers, shop owners, bartenders and residents of the drug-plagued
community.

A critic of the city's supervised injection site and the federal
government's heroin trials, Arsenault's views often clashed with
bureaucrats, politicians and other police.

Harm reduction still gets him fired up.

"They need the cure, not the poison. Any kind of harm reduction not
within a treatment model is a failed experiment. With the Four Pillars
[drug strategy], you can't have three anti-drug pillars and one
pro-drug pillar and expect to get anything done."

The police department was expected to hold a sendoff for Arsenault at
its Cambie Street police station yesterday afternoon, after the
Courier's deadline. "They're probably going to make me cry," he said.
"I put a lot of my heart and soul into this."