COP REPORT WORTH CONSIDERING DESPITE FLAWS

The city is scrambling to find some outside authority to evaluate the
massive police crackdown in the Downtown Eastside. Leaving the
assessment to the cops is just not on.

The haste is prompted by the fact the three-month experiment is
drawing to a close within a few weeks. Meanwhile, the furor over
allegations of police misconduct is growing. Two things are worth
remembering about this strategy.

First: it was a unilateral decision by the cops and took members of the
steering committee to implement the city's drug policy by surprise. Second:
city council refused to pick up the tab for continuing the project.

This week, police board chair and Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell
launched another attack against Human Rights Watch (HRW) for its
report on police abuse in the Downtown Eastside since the police
crackdown began on April 7.

Campbell is quite willing to afford this international watchdog group
all kinds of respect when it's reporting on human rights violations in
Zimbabwe, Slovenia or Afghanistan. But when it turns up in his town
and wags a finger at his police force, he goes bananas.

This is not to say Human Rights Watch didn't give the mayor plenty of
ammunition. A four-day investigation by two people in the Downtown
Eastside is a bit of a roller skating tour at best. Reporting witness
comments about cops using "leg irons," which don't exist, and
conducting a "skin search," which even the alleged victim allegedly
said didn't happen, gave Campbell lots to righteously huff and puff
about.

The unfortunate result is that this allows the mayor and the cops to
ignore a much more general problem with this kind of police
war-on-drugs strategy. It was referred to in both the HRW report and
the report filed with the Police Complaints Commission last week by
the legal advocacy group PIVOT. It was also reported in a Vancouver
Injection Drug Users study (VIDUS) conducted at St. Paul's Hospital by
the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV and AIDS.

Put bluntly, an inordinate number of drug users are "jacked up." This
is the term used to describe police actions when cops stop anyone on
the street, demand identification, then tell them to turn out their
pockets.

Police regularly confiscate money and small quantities of drugs and
drug paraphernalia. The questioning can take place while the suspects
are handcuffed and pushed to the ground. If this happened in your
neighbourhood, there would be a riot.

The VIDUS study reports 64 per cent of all HIV/AIDS patients dealt
with by researchers at St. Paul's complain they're regularly jacked
up. The mayor was dismissive of this criticism in his defense of the
police last week.

It's curious when you consider the whole foundation of the city's drug
strategy is to treat addicts as people with medical problems, not as
criminals. The police action, which the mayor heartily defends, serves
little purpose other than to drive these sick people to commit even
more crimes, usually theft or prostitution, so they can buy more
drugs, only to be "jacked up" again.

There is no doubt the police actions over the past two months have
reduced public disorder at Main and Hastings. An independent
assessment may prove it has done little else but spread the problem
around, and may well have had the unintended consequences of making
life more miserable and precarious for addicts.

This point was raised by Human Rights Watch.

As you read this, four male cops are going over the fine print in
their contracts for the position of deputy chief: Max Chalmers, Jim
Chu, Doug LePard and Bob Rich. In spite of Police Chief Jamie Graham's
strong objections, the fifth deputy, who is yet to be hired, will be a
civilian. He'll manage the money.