Pubdate: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC) Copyright: 2008 The Vancouver Sun Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/letters.html Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477 Author: Ian Mulgrew, Vancouver Sun POLICE CHIEF OVERACTING ABOUT CHRONIC THIEVES, PROPERTY CRIME Take a Valium chief. Caught the Gotham Assassins yet? How about any gangsta killer? Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu is a mischief-maker. Wringing his hands over chronic property-crime offenders and fulminating about the need to jail them was a performance unworthy of the promise he held out on taking office. Take a Valium, chief. Caught the Gotham Assassins yet? How about any gangsta killer? Vancouver has long been blighted by drug addicts, most with psychiatric problems, who support their habit and supplement meager social assistance or disability pensions with petty crime. Maybe the chief remembers back a few months when his own department put out a report saying officers spent too much time doing social and mental health work and this was a bad use of taxpayers' money. Guess what, chief? They are, by and large, the same people. This population clogs up our courts, diverts officers from more serious crime and consumes an inordinate share of our medical and social service resources. Statistics show nine out of 10 property crimes are drug-related, most committed by recalcitrant, invariably addicted recidivists. You may have heard a lot of public debate during the last decade over precisely this issue. Nothing Chu raised at his press conference this week was new. So why did he do it on the eve of the opening of the new Community Court project -- an innovative and hopeful attempt to address the problem? Was he trying to scuttle it before the experiment even got off the ground? Is he worried giving social support to these people instead of locking them up might work? I thought we long ago decided spending $55,000-plus to house a junkie in prison was a dumb use of tax money. Medical treatment and social services are cheaper and have a better track record of turning someone around. It costs only about $40 a day for drug treatment at a local not-for-profit facility. This troubled group of people is the target of the Four Pillars approach and other novel public policy strategies because jailing them has proven to be an expensive failure. On top of that, our provincial institutions are overcrowded and benign petty criminals with mental health ailments do not belong in penitentiary. If we were to follow Chief Chu's suggestion, it would cost us millions to build and maintain new jails to deal with these supposedly 379 chronic offenders who don't pose a risk. Let's get real. We could assign an individual cop to babysit each of these losers every day if they were the scourge Chu claims. We don't, because it's a waste of money. So is hiring prison guards to do that job. And, for the record, whenever one of these petty, messed up criminals commits an offence in which someone is hurt or even frightened, the courts in this province do hit them hard. Earlier this year, the Court of Appeal upheld an eight-year sentence handed a long-time, drug-addled recidivist because he scared the hell out of a woman before running away during a burglary. In a decision meant to guide lower court judges, Justice John Hall emphasized that lengthy prison time is warranted under such circumstances to protect the public. Shoplifting or stealing a bike shouldn't get you years of imprisonment; hurting or putting someone at risk is a different matter. The police chief is crying wolf about property crime to win headlines. He should be more worried about violent offenders and gang crime. I say let's see what happens with the Community Court and the attempt to direct health and social services towards this sad and tragic population. They are not a threat; they have become a "criminal" nuisance for myriad personal reasons, and because we have not provided the necessary health or social support. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake