CRIME ANALYST IS PROVING POPULAR

The addition of a crime analyst at the Delta police department was bound to
generate some attention, especially from the local media.

But when news broke of a thought-provoking report that touched on the
startling number of murders in the Indo-Canadian community, the press came
calling in a big way for Delta's new analyst.

Stuffed into the Delta police board room Thursday morning, nearly two dozen
media organizations questioned Alex Tyakoff, just one month on the job,
about his report, South Asian-Based Group Crime in British Columbia
(1993-2003). It's a document that was released publicly seven months
earlier, but for some reason only caught the attention of the media this week.

While working with the B.C. Organized Crime Agency, Tyakoff was
commissioned by the Canadian Heritage Department to conduct a focus group
report on the number of young males in the Indo-Canadian community being
murdered.

Beginning in 1993 and continuing over a 10-year period, 62 Indo-Canadian
men were victims of murder in the Lower Mainland. Just this week, two more
Indo-Canadian men were found murdered at a home in Vancouver.

Many of the suspects are also Indo-Canadian youth, as evidenced by seven
recent convictions as a result of Delta police investigations.

While Tyakoff's introduction to Delta may have been more eventful than he
bargained for, he's now focused on the development of the department's
intelligence-led policing section.

For years, the Delta police has had one officer tasked with gathering
intelligence. The difference now is Tyakoff, a civilian member, will
develop and disseminate the intelligence to street level officers all the
way up to senior management, using the information to deploy police
resources more efficiently.

"He's kind of like an early warning system for us," noted S/Sgt. John
Robin, who's in charge of the department's serious crime section.

"It helps us prioritize our responses and to recognize trends earlier,
whether it be property crimes, drugs or other crimes."

When teacher Gary Sidhu was shot to death on a North Delta street in 2002,
an intensive Delta police investigation ensued. Thousands of cell phone
records were gathered.

Tyakoff did an in-depth analysis on the frequency of calls, links to
people, basically identifying patterns which he was able to articulate to
the court. "It allows us to focus better on who the targets may be in a
particular case," Robin said.

Tyakoff started as a community planner. After university, he worked with
community-based organizations in the Tri-Cities area.

"I was interested in the social planning end of it, " he said from his new
ground floor office in Delta police headquarters.

From there he worked for some private developers, then got a job as a
planner with the District of Mission, ending up as a policy analyst in the
Ministry of Health's forensic unit.

"We dealt with the mentally ill in conflict with the law," Tyakoff said.

Soon, he found himself working more and more with criminal justice issues.

"I became interested about how a community planner could assist
them."Eventually, Tyakoff signed on with the now-defunct Coordinated Law
Enforcement Unit, a region-wide amalgamation of police forces investigating
organized crime. CLEU, as it was known, was taken over by the B.C.
Organized Crime Agency. Tyakoff worked there in drug enforcement and
proceeds of crime before taking the job in Delta.

He's impressed with the caliber of officers in the department, working with
them in the past on joint police investigations involving organized crime.

"My role will be to gather statistics on things like auto crime or break
and enters and discern any types of patterns. It's really to free up the
investigators so they can be on the road," he said.

Delta spent over a year developing the intelligence-led policing model,
with help from the Edmonton Police Service, which has an active
intelligence section.

Two longtime Delta police officers will also be part of the new section.

Looking to enhance the department's community policing model, Supt. Rich
Drinovz said they struck a service delivery committee.

"They went out across North America and examined policing models. They came
back with an intelligence-led model which we've now adapted to fit Delta,"
he said. "It's a proactive deployment of resources."