MEAN STREETS NO MORE

Vancouver has 6 1/2 years to clean up for the Olympics. And police have
given the city a head start with a sweep of the Downtown Eastside that
has changed the face of the notorious neighbourhood -- and earned its
share of critics, reports Robert Matas

It's a warmish summer evening on Hastings Street, a week after the
announcement that Vancouver has won its bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

The damaged people who use the sidewalk as their living room are
engaged in their evening routines.

Jeffory is crouched on a rusty, overturned shopping cart, keeping his
eye out for his next hit of crack cocaine. Brian is trying to sell
something at a makeshift flea market of stuff recycled mostly from
back-lane dumpsters, secondhand clothing stores and break-ins around
the city. Barb is spreading her stuff out on the steps of the St.
James Anglican Church, settling in for the night.

As Sergeant Tony Zanatta strolls down the street, a woman of
considerable size with a big smile on her face approaches him. "You
guys are doing a great job," she says. "You've really cleaned this
up."

A clock has been set up in Vancouver to count the days until the
opening ceremonies for the Winter Olympics, scheduled to begin in 6
1/2 years. The clock also marks a deadline of a different sort.

One of the biggest challenges facing the city will be to repair the
lives of those in the notorious Downtown Eastside neighbourhood and
renew the vitality of historic Hastings Street before the rest of the
world arrives.

Hastings Street was once the lifeline of the city, comparable to Yonge
Street in Toronto.

But in recent years, drug dealers, prostitutes and addicts took the
street away from the elderly, the poor and the marginally competent
people who had inherited the territory as Hastings slipped into old
age.

A seven-block stretch dominated by dilapidated buildings awash in
graffiti is widely regarded as the most battered strip of urban life
in the country. About 16,000 people live in the Downtown Eastside.
Health authorities say 25 per cent of the population there is addicted
to a narcotic, and 40 per cent of the addicts are mentally ill.

The street had the largest open-air drug market in North America,
financed by the rewards of break-ins and robberies across the city.
Deaths from drug overdoses in the urine-soaked alleyway running
parallel to Hastings have been considered routine. If the drugs did
not kill the addicts, the deadly infections spread by sharing dirty
needles did.

A new police chief with a new approach to policing is now trying to
halt the street's 20-year spiral down to its current state of
destitution. But Chief Jamie Graham is acting with
less-than-enthusiastic support from city hall and the city police board.

He also has to contend with a flood of accusations against the
department. A civil lawsuit was filed this week against six officers
who allegedly picked up suspected drug dealers, took them to Stanley
Park and beat them. The officers also face criminal charges.

Also this week, the B.C. police complaints commissioner announced the
RCMP will investigate 50 complaints of improper and possibly illegal
activity by numerous Vancouver officers over the past nine months. The
complaints include allegations of violent assaults and so-called
"starlight drives," when officers are said to force people into police
cars, assault and threaten them and then leave them in some other
neighbourhood.

Those troubles came a few weeks after native leaders called for an
inquiry into possible police involvement in the death of Mi'kmaq
native Frank Paul. Officers had told the family that Mr. Paul died in
a hit-and-run accident, but a security videotape from the police
station showed Mr. Paul in custody hours before his death Dec. 6,
1998. He appeared nearly comatose and unable to stand. He was found
hours later, frozen to death in an alley in the Downtown Eastside not
far from the police station.

As if that were not enough, the force was accused last month of
routinely requiring those it arrests to remove all their clothing for
a strip search. Two protesters filed a court action and dozens of
similarly aggrieved people popped up, wanting to add their names to
the class-action lawsuit.

And then, from New York, Human Rights Watch lambasted the Vancouver
police for its aggressive crackdown on Hastings Street. Adding stature
to its concerns, the group was represented by former federal cabinet
minister Lloyd Axworthy.

"It seems like I wake up every day and read in the papers about what a
bad person I am," says Sgt. Zanatta, a 20-year veteran of the force
who feels every criticism against the department is a personal attack.
"But when I see what we are doing down here, I know it is not true."

Sgt. Zanatta, who is well into his second tour of duty in the Downtown
Eastside, says longtime residents regularly approach cops walking the
beat to thank them for making their neighbourhood safer.

His claim is not just bravado. City councillor Sam Sullivan, who went
out with police recently to see what they were up to, says initially
he thought the people talking to the cops were organized to show
support for the force.

"I thought it was unbelievable, that these people were plants," he
says. He was convinced they were sincere after he heard an elderly
drunk, with a month of stubble on his face and less than a full mouth
of teeth, speak with a cop on the beat.

Pushed out by the more aggressive activity of drug addicts, "these
people were afraid to go on the street before," he says.

Despite the excitement over the Olympics, Sgt. Zanatta says the shift
in policing was driven by the fact that the street was out of control,
not by the prospect of Vancouver hosting the international
competition.

Chief Graham identified the cleanup of the Downtown Eastside as his
top priority last year as part of a wider push in the city that
includes supervised injection sites for heroin users and improved
health-care services.

The idea behind the new approach is simple: People usually don't
commit crimes right in front of the police. To prove the point, two
uniformed officers were assigned to the centre of the cauldron -- the
intersection of Hastings and Main -- where up to 200 people would
congregate at times to deal in stolen goods and drugs. The crowds dispersed.

The next step was a three-month experiment to increase police
visibility throughout the neighbourhood. About a dozen uniformed
policemen were put on the streets around the clock from April to the
end of June.

Despite the surfeit of crime, they were instructed in the first month
to make arrests only for trafficking in drugs and bail violations.
They broke up fights and moved on. They seized drugs without arresting
anyone for possession. They shone flashlights in the faces of people
in the middle of the night and asked almost everyone for ID.

Within weeks, almost one-third of the people on Hastings disappeared,
Sgt. Zanatta says. The daily influx of drug dealers and addicts
selling stuff from suburban break-ins was interrupted.

"You no longer see these big groups standing on the street corner,"
Sgt. Zanatta says. "We have made the neighbourhood a safer place to
live in. . . . You can now see drunks on the street. We have not seen
them here for years."

The people who still populate Hastings tell the same story. Jeffory,
who refused to give his last name, says many dealers have left the
area, making it more difficult for him to score his crack cocaine. A
prostitute says the streets have too many cops. "Those who depend on
crime, like selling drugs or other stuff, seemed to have been hit
hard," she says.

Sandra Marie Bonneau, 45, who is wandering down an alley behind
Hastings with a pipe for smoking crack cocaine, says the street has
calmed down in recent months. Addicts still do drugs but not as openly
as before. "You don't have to flaunt it," she says.

As life on the street changed, Sgt. Zanatta says, police stepped up
their expectations. They no longer tolerated weapons, fighting or
packs of people intimidating others. But he acknowledges the measures
do not wipe out drugs and drug use in the Downtown Eastside. The
dealers have moved down the street and into other neighbourhoods. The
addicts have moved indoors and out of sight.

"There's still lots of dealing -- it's just not on the street," he
says as he walks along Hastings past weathered people sitting on
broken lawn chairs and boxes.

There are small pockets of trouble outside the Downtown Eastside, he
says. "But those problems are nothing compared to the concentration of
problems we had here."

Community activists invigorated by the recent barrage of criticism of
the force have vigorously attacked the program, charging that police
were unnecessarily intrusive and in some cases assaulted and
strip-searched people without adequate justification. Although police
reject the allegations, the concerns about the initiative have been
heard.

In anticipation of extending the program to the end of the year, the
department drew up a request for $1.2-million to pay overtime for the
initiative.

It withdrew the request after realizing it did not have the backing of
city council, which is dominated by politicians more sympathetic to
community activists than to police.

Undaunted, police are now considering cutbacks in the traffic division
and school programs to pay for the Downtown Eastside patrol. "We're
not going to let the Downtown Eastside go back to the way it was,"
says Deputy Chief Constable Bob Rich.

But without the support of city hall or its own police board, it is
not clear if the department can sustain its current efforts.

As the Olympic clock ticks down, authorities will then have to go back
to the drawing boards to come up with another idea to turn things
around. The clock will hit zero at midnight, Feb. 11, 2010.

[sidebar]

*Before and after

On March 27 -- a day after a welfare payday -- student researchers
accompanied police walking the beat in the Downtown Eastside. They
counted the incidents of drug use, trafficking, assault and other
offences. Their research was interrupted three times while police
dealt with a stabbing and a report of a man with a gun, and arrested
an armed robbery suspect. Two months later, on May 29 -- also a day
after welfare payments -- the count was repeated, this time without
interruptions.

The figures below are the May results with the March figures noted in
parentheses:

Instances of open drug use: 16 (96)

Offers of drugs: 4 (12)

Number of openly displayed weapons: 0 (3)

Number of fights: 0 (1)

Number of assaults: 1 (3)

Breaches of peace and disturbances: 32 (214)

Instances of damage to property: 0 (1)

Source -Vancouver Police report