TOP DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE COP ADMITS DRUG MART STILL OPEN

The Downtown Eastside and adjoining lower East Side have seen the
most significant drop in crime in the city over the last two years,
says the district's police commander.

Property crime plummeted by 20 per cent and violent crime by 12 per
cent to make for a safer quadrant of the city once plagued by
violence and thefts, said Vancouver Police Insp. Bob Rolls. That's
the good news.

The bad news is police believe the population of drug addicts
increased in the past few years. So have the number of mentally ill
people and those without a home, Rolls said.

One reason for those spikes is governments' continued placement of
social housing and health services for marginalized people in the
Downtown Eastside, he said. Lenient sentences for drug dealers and
not enough officers on the streets compound the problem, he added.
"They continue to place people with various mental health issues into
that area. A lot of the social housing is still concentrated in that
area, and these are the people who don't necessarily have a lot of
other things going on in their lives. We put them into that
environment, they're looking for something in life and they're
surrounded by this drug activity, and a lot of those people become
drug addicted."

The result is ongoing selling and using of drugs on the streets and
alleys in plain view of the public and police. In April 2003, the
police formed the Citywide Enforcement Team to "disrupt and suppress"
drug activity in the Downtown Eastside.

Though Rolls believes the enforcement team curbed a lot of the drug
activity, he admits the open drug market still exists. Keeping the
activity at current levels with the current complement of officers is
proving difficult, he said.

"We are very strategic and I think we do a good job of moving
resources around, but twice this year we've cleaned out Chinatown and
right now we're having problems again in Chinatown. So we're having
to move a bunch of police resources back and clean up Pender Street again."

Even with more officers tackling the problem, Rolls said police alone
can't reduce or eliminate the open drug market.

"I'm really proud of the work our officers do. You're having to deal
with the same thing day in and day out and you have to keep your
motivation up and you have to be diplomatic and so on. We're doing a
really good job with what we've got, but police will never cure the
problem of drug addiction."

Three years ago, Mayor Larry Campbell said in his inauguration speech
that he hoped to eliminate the open drug market by the Nov. 19, 2005
election. In a Nov. 2 Courier cover story, 28 people interviewed in
the Downtown Eastside said the open drug market has remained the
same. Some said it's gotten worse.

An example of the consequences of drug use occurred Wednesday when
police responded to an assault in a hotel on Pender Street and a man
on crack cocaine went berserk and tried to wrestle an officer's gun away.

The September 2003 opening of Insite, the supervised injection site
at 139 East Hastings, has allowed addicts to inject drugs indoors,
but drug use is still visible in the streets, Rolls added.

"Harm reduction is important, but I think that we need a lot more
investment in education and treatment, and there's a lot of talk
about it, but I think that we've got a long ways to go."