51 DIVISION PATROLS TOUGH TURF

The detective office at 51 Division is not in the best of moods. The
weekend has been long.

And so we sit in the foyer of the Parliament-Front cop precinct
yesterday, waiting not for Godot, but for Babiar.

That wait, too, grows long.

So you call from your cellphone.

"He's not coming down," says the unnamed detective who answers. "He's
too busy -- we're too busy."

Words are exchanged.

"What's more important?" the cop then asks. "Your column or the
pursuit of justice?"

And then, just as a dead end is envisioned in this war of words, there
suddenly appears in the foyer a man in a black suit -- Det. John
Babiar, the lead detective.

"You've got three minutes," he says.

But he gives up five.

Once upon a time, when 51 Division worked out of a cramped,
rodent-infested, squat-like building in the heart of Regent Park, it
was known as Fort Apache.

Little Has Changed

Other than the new venue, little is different today at 51 Division --
its turf being a socio-economic mix that runs from high-end offices,
hotels and renovated brownstones to ramshackle rooming houses, crack
dens, down-market hooker strolls, seedy booze joints, and enough
housing projects, hostels and sanctuaries for the down and the
disenfranchised to have it officially declared a welfare republic.

That, quite simply, is the lay of this core-city land.

The weekend that just passed was busy, but not abnormal.

Gunshots are no longer a rarity here. Headlines and body counts can
attest to that.

Drugs have always been a constant.

"It's been organized chaos this weekend," says Babiar.

And then he rhymes off the list.

"We have a kiddie diddler to process," he says. "Three counts. He's up
here from Florida, but he turned himself in instead of trying to get
back to the other side.

"So, there's one pedophile no longer out there.

"And then we had a domestic assault, a bad one," he says. "Then the
shooting at River and Oak.

"And, oh yeah, there was that drug ripoff that went bad on Sherbourne
St., and a guy tossed off the balcony.

"He's alive, but paralyzed," he adds.

"And then there was the Pembroke St. incident ... the suspect turned
himself in. No name yet.

"It's still being processed."

And, with that, Det. Babiar takes his leave.

"Call me later," he says.

We had ventured there, initially, to learn more about the undercover
drug operation on Pembroke St., the one in which one officer from 51
Division fired at a fleeing car after the suspect, the doors of his
vehicle open, reversed to not only bowl over the cop's partner, but
bowl over the pregnant woman who appeared to be the suspect's
passenger and who was ... what? ... buying drugs?

"Who's to say at this point," Babiar offers.

"Right now, we don't know her status in this investigation. She's gone
from being a woman about to have a baby to not knowing the driver of
the car she was in.

"But she's okay. She was treated and released from hospital," he says.
"And the suspect is now in custody."

Crack's Not Foreign

This is the same suspect who, one presumes, briefly made it onto
CITY-TV's website by calling in to say that he didn't know the men who
approached his car were cops and instead believed they were thugs
about to rob him -- understandable, perhaps, considering the street
upon which he was doing whatever it was he was doing.

If there are two streets in 51 Division where crack cocaine is not
foreign, they are Pembroke and George Sts. -- parallel avenues with
parallel histories.

As for the pregnant woman, rumour had it that she perhaps lived at
Street Haven, a non-profit sanctuary for troubled women on Pembroke
where there is an expertise in mental-health issues, addictions,
poverty and homelessness.

It was, after all, less than a block away from where both a cop and a
pregnant woman were knocked to the ground during the investigation of
a suspicious car in the neighbourhood.

The buzzer was answered by a young woman.

She had heard of the incident a short distance away but, no, she would
not say if the pregnant woman in yesterday's newspaper had been a
resident there. "Even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you," the woman says.
"Privacy reasons, you understand."

And then she closed the door, much like Det. John Babiar took his
leave to organize the chaos of a weekend that became too long.