COPS TRAUMATIZE EAST SIDE FAMILY

An East Side family is filing a complaint with the police department and
the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner after they say police
mistakenly raided their grandfather's home Wednesday in search of a
marijuana grow-op.

The incident has left 40-year-old Rowena Liu and her father, Yat Wah Pang,
86, shaken and worried about the image the family now has in the
neighbourhood, near East 15th and Rupert.

"My father is still nervous, doesn't want to eat," said Liu, who was
visiting at the time of the raid and said she had a gun pointed at her face
and was handcuffed.

"People will now think we did bad things. There were lots of police here
and outside, but I don't know why. We have never had problems with police."

It began around 1 p.m. after Liu and her father returned home from lunch.
Sitting in the main floor of the house, Liu noticed several police cars on
the street, so she opened the curtains to get a better look.

Her curiosity had her staring down the barrel of a handgun held by a police
officer standing on her front lawn, who was backed up by other officers in
the yard and at the front door yelling for her to let them in.

"We were scared and didn't know if they were police or coming to rob us,"
said Liu, who reluctantly opened the door, only to be immediately put in
handcuffs.

Police provided her father, who walks with a cane, with a chair and told
them not to move from the entrance of the house until police searched both
floors.

Police found nothing but Liu estimates they were in the house for an hour
before they took off her handcuffs. They left her with a copy of a search
warrant, a police officer's business card and then apologized-sort of.

Const. Sarah Bloor, a spokeswoman for the police department, said the Grow
Busters team executed the search warrant because it strongly believed there
was a grow-op inside.

Police handcuffed Liu and pointed the gun at her for "safety
reasons"-common police procedures when entering a suspected grow-op.

"It's possible that it was dismantled and cleaned up before we arrived,"
said Bloor, who said the "upper portion" of the house had been cleaned out
and emptied.

"There was no furniture at all in the upstairs. That is where our officers
believe there was a previous grow operation."

The Courier found otherwise Thursday afternoon-the living room, dining
room, kitchen and two of the three bedrooms were all furnished in the
well-kept house, commonly referred to as a Vancouver special.

The family recently cleaned the carpet in one of the bedrooms to prepare it
for the arrival of Liu's 25-year-old niece, Elsa Pang, who scoffed at the
police's suggestion that there had been a grow-op in the house.

Pang, who has an apartment in Strathcona but planned to move back into the
house this weekend, said the "upper portion" of the house Bloor was
referring to is probably the vacant bedroom she's moving into.

The family also learned later that police asked neighbours if the family
was Vietnamese and wanted to know if they owned a Mercedes-Benz parked on
the street.

"I'm concerned about the racial profiling by the police," said Pang, whose
family is Chinese and emigrated from Hong Kong about 30 years ago, and does
not own the Mercedes parked in front of their house.

"They told our neighbours that a lot of people who drive Mercedes Benz
cars, who are Vietnamese, are drug dealers. We're not Vietnamese and we're
not drug dealers."

Pang is studying at the International College of Traditional Chinese
Medicine while her brother, who keeps a room in the house when he's
visiting from Seattle, is a pharmacist. The vacant room used to belong to
their father, who recently moved out.

As previous police investigations have shown, grow-ops can significantly
damage a house, causing mold to form and paint to peel. Garbage bags full
of dirt and lighting, electrical and venting equipment are often strewn
throughout a house. None of that was evident in this case, and the family
was never told the police grounds for obtaining a search warrant-the
one-page warrant left behind simply states police believed there was a
grow-op in the house. The information won't be released by the courts until
police file what is called a "report to justice," which tells the court
what police seized-if anything.

In this case, police have yet to file a report to the court and did not
respond to a request from the Courier to provide the written reasons.

Grow Busters is a police-led team that works with B.C. Hydro, the fire
department and city inspectors to shut down the city's grow-ops, now
estimated to be operating in about 10,000 houses and warehouses.

Since July 2000, the team has executed 800 search warrants. Of those, there
were only three houses where police didn't find marijuana, said Bloor, who
couldn't say if the three were mistakenly identified or simply dismantled
before police arrived.

"That's a good question. It can go either way. Once we attend and we don't
find a grow operation, we simply log it as 'no grow.'"