VANCOUVER SLUM A 'POLICE STATE'

Social Workers Decry Crackdown On Traffickers Before Addiction Centres Open

VANCOUVER -- A police crackdown in skid row is breaking up hooker buddy
systems, driving them off into dark alleys where they are more likely to be
attacked, street counsellors said yesterday.

The social workers were outraged that only the enforcement arm of a plan to
clean up the open drug market on the Downtown Eastside has been
implemented, while funding for treatment programs is still being haggled over.

Annabel Webb, an spokeswoman for Justice for Girls, said a "police state"
has been imposed on the neighbourhood.

"How else would one describe the extreme police presence, the mass
searches, interrogations, and arbitrary detainments, or the suspension of
liberty and mobility rights of the residents."

Sixty officers have been pulled from divisions around the city to take part
in the three-month sweep. Thirty officers are on patrol 24 hours a day on
foot, horseback, bikes and in cruisers, looking for drug traffickers.

Wanda Villanueva, a counsellor at the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre,
said women she works with don't trust police and are hiding from them,
working in back alleys and trolling alone on the outskirts of the Downtown
Eastside so as not to attract their attention. "That's creating a more
dangerous situation for them, but on the Downtown Eastside these women are
being targeted by police, thrown up against walls and harassed," she said.
"We are worried that at the end of this we'll only have more missing women."

Vancouver police Const. Sarah Bloor said hookers are not the target of the
sweep and that officers routinely patrol areas where they are known to
frequent, "but we can't be there all the time."

"There are serious dangers associated with the sex trade and with getting
into a stranger's vehicle."

Counsellors working with the addicts and hookers stuck in the notorious
ghetto say the timing of the sweep is cruel and that police should have
waited until a proposed safe injection site was built and the street people
had a safe place to go.

"It tells me that the police want a budget increase and they have a lot of
power, because they got what they wanted," said Daisy Kler, a spokeswoman
for the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter.

Mayor Larry Campbell had promised to have a safe-injection site in
operation as soon as possible after his election in November. But it was
put on hold while Health Canada developed a process for applying for a
safe-injection site.

Ultimately, the city health authority's proposal didn't go to Ottawa until
March 7 and only after a last-minute visit in February to a safe-injection
site in Zurich by four top health-authority planners. Now they must wait
for federal approval.