ON THE BEAT

With dealers shielded and few treatment options for addicts, cops must
strike a fine balance.

By Lindsay Kines Vancouver Sun Nov. 24, 2000

Late on a Thursday evening, Constable Clive Milligan of the Vancouver
city police turns his cruiser into the alley on the south side of East
Hastings and pulls to a stop. In the glare of the car's headlights,
people scatter from the alcoves and doorways in what police call "The
Lane of Shame" -- a short stretch of blacktop carpeted in needle
wrappers and reeking of garbage.

Milligan rolls down his window as a man in a hooded jacket walks
quickly past the car and makes a break for the street. "How are you
doing?" Milligan says. "Stand over here in front of my car."

Like so many police officers on the Downtown Eastside, Milligan has
learned to read the street like a second language. Over the noise of
the car engine, he can detect the clink of a crack pipe being dropped
behind a dumpster. Or he can spot, in the shadows, the quick but sure
movements of an addict tossing his dope in the trash.

As the man steps to the front of the cruiser, Milligan climbs out,
shines his flashlight on the ground and stoops to retrieve a folded
piece of paper. The flap contains a "point" of heroin -- a tenth of a
gram worth about $10 at the corner of Main and Hastings. But Milligan,
a 14-year police veteran and the acting sergeant on shift this night,
knows it would be difficult to pin the drugs to the man now standing
before him. "The defence would be all over me. 'How much litter is in
that alley? Did you see him drop it?'

"No. But I thought he might have.

"'Oh. Could he have dropped a cigarette butt?'

"Yes.

"'And how many people were in that lane?

"Well, two for sure.

"'How many in this lane during the day?

"Hundreds."

Milligan knows all this as he questions the man, whose black, lank
hair hangs over his face. He was in a recovery program, he says. His
friend got sick and died. Upset, he smoked a joint to take the edge
off, failed a urine test, and got tossed from the program. Now he's
here on East Hastings and back on heroin.

After a few minutes, Milligan tells the man he can go. Then it
happens. In a scene that illustrates how things have become on
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, the man turns as he is walking away and
asks for his drugs back. Milligan refuses.

"We're not in the business of handing out drugs to people we've just
taken them off," he says, later. "Obviously, that's a ridiculous
concept. But that's what he figured was his last chance. That's the
desperation. He's asking the police to give him dope. It's pretty
absurd, really."

Absurd, but perhaps to be expected these days on the Downtown
Eastside, where the drug problem has spun so far out of control that
nothing seems clear anymore.

Now, addicts ask police for drugs. Now, people openly smoke crack
outside the Carnegie Centre at Main and Hastings, while dealers
brazenly ply their trade in full view, holding wads of cash and Tic
Tac boxes filled with crack cocaine, even as people board buses to the
suburbs.

As governments search for answers, the police have been left largely
alone on the front lines to deal with the fallout, one crisis at a
time. It is a confusing place to be. The Vancouver police department
has tried to strike a balance by enforcing the drug laws even as they
argue that enforcement alone won't solve the problem.

"Canada has never had a war on drugs," Deputy Chief Gary Greer says.
"That's an American euphemism." The new laws, bigger prisons, tougher
sentencing, zero tolerance at the borders. "All of that occurred
there," he said. "It has not happened here."

Here, the Vancouver police board and the police department recently
endorsed a drug policy that stresses enforcement, yes, but also
treatment, harm reduction and prevention -- the so-called four pillars
of the Vancouver Agreement.

"The Vancouver police board and the Vancouver police department accept
that substance addiction should be dealt with as a health and social
issue and not a criminal one," the policy states.

The department stops short of endorsing safe injection sites or heroin
maintenance. But the policy does support a "comprehensive continuum of
care model for substance abuse" that includes prevention, detox,
counselling, housing, training and literacy education.

Nor does this seem to be a case of window dressing, a bromide thrown
at the media and community groups while beat cops are out there
busting chops. In fact, it's hard to find an officer, whether in
management or standing on a street corner, who doesn't believe
problems on the Downtown Eastside are beyond their control.

"This is not a police problem," Sergeant Doug Lang says, echoing the
Vancouver Agreement almost word for word. "This is a health problem
and a community problem and a social problem."

Unfortunately, the reality is, many of the resources pegged in the
policy papers as part of the "continuum of care" simply do not exist.

Sergeant Mark Horsley, who oversees the "Dawn Patrol" on the Downtown
Eastside, says he is routinely approached by two groups of people:
"People who want drug treatment and there's generally no place to take
them; and people who have mental problems to the level that they
really feel the need for institutionalization, and you can't do it."

In one case, Horsley said he encountered a mentally ill man who wanted
to be back in care so badly that he planned to rob a bank to get
there. Horsley managed to stop him during the day, but that night,
after the bank closed, the man robbed a McDonald's. "You're dealing
with a guy who doesn't even belong in the court system," Horsley says.

So much time is spent dealing with the mentally ill and other aspects
of the social services that policing sometimes takes a back seat. Last
week, as Constables Ian Upton and Tim Houchen prepared to give a
Vancouver Sun reporter a tour of the Downtown Eastside, they were
called to an apartment off Commercial Drive where a mentally ill man
claimed to have a gun and was threatening to harm himself.

For the second time in nine days, police headed to the apartment along
with a negotiator, paramedics and an entire emergency response team.
In the end, the man had no gun, refused to go to hospital voluntarily,
and had to be arrested under the Mental Health Act.

Then, for five hours, the police officers waited with him at Vancouver
Hospital until he could be examined and admitted, five hours they
could have been walking the beat at Main and Hastings. The situation,
they said, was typical.

No wonder senior members of the Vancouver city police often sound more
like social policy analysts these days. Yes, their pillar --
enforcement -- is crucial, they say. But they also point to the
desperate need for expanded mental health services, better housing,
drug-treatment beds, training programs and education. There are too
many children at risk on the Downtown Eastside, they say, too many
illegitimate businesses fronting the drug trade, and too many bar
stools in a neighbourhood with too many other problems.

Dealer Makes $1,000 A Day

The conditions, they say, force them to get creative. They crack down
on hotels to force them to improve people's living conditions. They've
gone after liquor establishments for over-serving alcohol and
harbouring drug dealers. They played a key role in getting rice
alcohol pulled off the shelves of corner stores.

And yes, police do conduct undercover buy and bust operations to
attack the drug traffickers and restore order on the street, says
Greer, a former inspector on the Downtown Eastside. But it's rarely as
easy as it looks.

"Some people believe police have these huge all-encompassing powers
and we don't," he says.

Police need probable grounds to arrest and search someone. They need
evidence to make an arrest and get a charge. But dealers are aware of
how police and the courts work, and have set up their businesses
accordingly.

Many of the dealers carry the drugs in their mouth -- rocks of crack
wrapped in plastic that look like pieces of roasted peanuts. If the
police approach, they swallow the evidence.

The buy and busts attempt to get around this by having undercover
officers purchase drugs directly from the dealers. But the dealers
have learned to use middle men or "middlers," who are often drug
addicts themselves. One holds the drugs, the other the cash, while a
third steers buyers from one to the other. The main dealer, who does
not have substance-abuse problem and works simply for the money,
stands back and runs the operation.

One such non-addicted dealer, interviewed by The Sun, claims to clear
more than $1,000 on a good day after paying off his supplier and his
"staff." He works a seven-hour shift at Main and Hastings, selling
crack and powder. So far, he says, he had sent more than $60,000 back
to his parents in Latin America. He has never been arrested, he says,
and has never carried more than $5 in his wallet.

"It becomes our challenge to get to them," Horsley responds. "If we
could do it half the time, I'd be thrilled."

Yet even when police do bust people, it rarely keeps them off the
street for long, Greer says. "We arrest. We charge. But they're
released prior to their trial to carry on down there. And, when their
trial does occur and they're convicted, if you look at sentencing,
very few get any kind of sentence and they're back on the street again."

If they're addicts, they're back committing crime to support their
habit or middling to earn one rock of crack cocaine for every 10 they
sell. It is a frustrating cycle for police, especially when they are
faced with increased public pressure to stop the trade. Police have to
consider the benefit to the community of sitting in an office, writing
up a charge against an addict caught with a $10 rock, when they could
be on the beat keeping a lid on street disorder.

Accordingly, the department stresses "high visibility" policing, based
on the belief that an officer's mere presence can provide a sense of
safety in the neighbourhood -- even if the officer stands on a corner
doing nothing. In police parlance, it's called "doing a Seinfeld," a
nod to the television show about nothing that was, nevertheless,
highly successful. In the first nine months of the year, there were
three homicides in District Two -- down from 10 over the same time
period in 1999, and officers credit the decline to their higher visibility.

Where Are The Other Pillars?

Not everyone agrees, of course. In the famously polarized and
fractious Downtown Eastside, there are at least three distinct
critiques of current policing practices.

Groups like the Community Alliance, made up of residents and business
people, want police to deal with drug use as they would anywhere else
in the city. Otherwise, they say, the Downtown Eastside becomes a
catchment area for addicts and dealers. If enforcing the laws means
clogging the courts with addicts and dealers, so be it. That will put
the onus on judges to do their job.

Another constituency, one that includes many of those who provide
social services, believes it is pointless to pursue and detain
addicts, as all are sick and many are mentally ill. The more
Seinfeldian the police, the better, since visibility and consistency
will lead to a more orderly street scene.

Then there is the view that the police are already far too visible,
that they are engaged in heavy-handed, American-style policing of
downtrodden addicts. Many addicts and former addicts would rather see
much of the police budget channelled to services instead.

Faced with so many diverse views, the police have tried to work with
all the groups, while still upholding a semblance of the law. But time
is short. Two years ago, city council committed 20 extra officers for
three years to restore order in the Downtown Eastside. "The whole
concept of us having these extra people was to hold the fort for a
while to let other people, other agencies, other pieces of this puzzle
get ready and to get in place and to get up and running," says Horsley
of the Dawn Patrol. Two years later, none of those other pieces are in
place.

"Where's the health care?" asks Inspector Beach. "Where's the housing?
Where are all the liquor inspectors?"

Despite everything, police officials say beat officers remain
motivated. "They can all see ways they can improve the big picture,
but that's not stopping them from fulfilling what their obligations
are," Horsley says. "The bottom line is we're going to hold up our
friggin' pillar and we're going to hope that some other people get
their pillars in while we're holding this pillar."

"I would hate to think that five years from now it will be the same
down there as it is today," Beach says. "I mean, can we afford that
many more victims, that many more lost sons and daughters and
grandchildren? Can we?"