All that matters

Every year, the Vancouver police come knocking on City Council’s door begging bowl in hand. A battle then erupts on Council, through the civilian police board, on into the press and through various interested organizations before exploding into the public. Some of the players involved in this annual test of wills are entrenched veterans, like the police and organizations like PIVOT Legal Society. Others are relatively green, including many of the ultimate decision makers, such as those who sit on Council and the Police Board. A great deal of political capital, time and energy is expended in the ensuing fight, capital, time and energy that could so much more fruitfully be expended on more pressing but thoroughly neglected issues, like police policing, social issue-related so-called crimes, and the gauging and the adjusting to changing public expectations of police and policing.

Yet the public’s basic requirement for police has remained pretty much the same over the millennia that we’ve hosted police forces: public safety. Jim Chu, incoming police chief, has publicly stated in his first appearances on the new stage, “Public safety will always be my priority.”

Those who urge a larger increase to police budgets, and those who resist such increases, trot out high-fallutin’ criminology theories, inscrutable statistics, and reams of anecdotal testimonies to squeeze a little here and stretch a little there, but none can overcome the basic fact that the public pay police to protect them, period. That’s the only measure that matters.

Fix the police budget

There are always complaints about crimes, and there will always be a certain level of crime, but the overall crime rate in Vancouver compared to cities this size around the world is generally low enough to be tolerable. And the police budget required to achieve this current rate of crime is also tolerable. So why not lock things in as they are now and do away with the annual battling over budgets?

We could index the police budget to StatsCan measures of the overall crime rate much the way the budget to pay Councilors is indexed to StatsCan measures of the average pay packet for a full-time working Vancouverite.

The annual report by the Vancouver Police Department came out earlier this week and the budget is soon to be the big battle de jure again. In it, we find that there are about 80,000 incidences of crime reported in Vancouver for the year 2006. The total police budget was $159 million. That comes out to about $2,000 per incident. Lock that $2,000 figure down (adjusting for inflation) for next year. If incidences of crime go up 5%, so will the budget: no battling required at City Council. If it goes down, so does the budget, with a big “thank you” to police.

Police priorities

In Jim Chu’s address to the city in the Vancouver Police Department’s annual report, he writes, “The residents of Vancouver deserve to live in a city where they feel safe to walk anywhere at any time without threat or fear.” In a following sentence, a smaller subgroup of residents is addressed: “Homeowners should be able to sleep at night, secure and without worry.”

Why only homeowners? Shouldn’t renters be able to sleep at night without worry too? And what about those residents of Vancouver who don’t have a home: are these citizens not also covered by police mandates to serve and protect?

It may not be wise and it certainly isn’t picturesque, but it also isn’t illegal to sleep outside. For whatever reason, those who do have made that choice (or have had it made for them by circumstances many of which are beyond anyone’s control).

It would have been refreshing to hear Chu speak of all Vancouver residents, those ensconced in houses, those cooped up in apartments, and those sleeping rough under bridges, equally deserving to sleep at night without worry, and his personal assurance that that is what his mandate and his priority really is.

What is the point?

Let’s see, a Monday in late August: what’s on offer from all the big professional journalism school-trained journalists in the major dailies? Vancouver Sun: Boy, are panhandlers ever bad eh?; prostitution sure is bad too; but your agribusiness-generated food is safe no matter what you’ve heard lately; and, boy, should parents ever take a bigger role in their kid’s education.

The Province: Boy, is the PNE ever fun; but, boy oh boy, kids sure should get a better education; and boy, is Vancouver ever the best city to live in, eh?

The National Post: Boy, are the federal Liberals ever to blame for everything gone wrong for the Conservatives; boy, are the Ontario Liberals ever to blame for everything gone wrong there; boy, will the federal Conservatives ever win a majority next time; and, boy, was the Ku Klux Klan ever bad, eh?

The Globe and Mail: Boy oh boy, should we ever not vote based on candidates’ naked physiques; boy, is Quebec ever different; boy, are the bad federal Liberals ever to blame for everything going wrong for the Conservatives; and boy, will the boomers ever cost the health care system, eh?

What was on offer in the last issue of The Republic in August? Maher Arar should be awarded the Order of Canada; the world’s elites are encircling themselves with high security; rights should not be denied citizens because they’re poor; Bush may be clinically disturbed; global warming can be paid for with the same money that was used to rescue markets; and jailed environmental activists need basic support like fresh food deliveries.

The point is, The Republic is put together by amateurs striving in their spare time to offer something of value to the public good. How do those professionals at the big dailies, who do this for a living, get up in the morning only to put out the same old, useless, tired, clichéd crap day after day? Besides the paycheque, is there even a point?

In a delicious newish H L Menken biography, we find him once writing, “It is the vast and militant ignorance, the wide-spread fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable.” Eighty years later, we can add “boring and lazy” to the crime sheet.

Not so total information awareness

A curious error occurs in the introduction to a report released this week by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime: “Leaving aside 19th century China,” it says, “no other country in the world has ever produced narcotics on such a deadly scale” as Afghanistan today. It also notes, without comment, that by far the greatest surge of opium production has occurred in Helmand province, which is the province under British responsibility in the parceled-out NATO occupation of that country. Also, British forces are charged with the responsibility for stamping out the opium trade.

It’s hard to know where to start with the ironies. But for starters, an apology to China is in order. China produced little of the heroin to which 10% of the adult male population of the entire vast country had become addicted by the 1860s. The Boxer Rebellion, with tacit government backing, was a popular revolt against the British Navy that had for ten years been engaged in bombarding Chinese defences to open up the great river systems of China to British merchant cargo ships delivering tons of heroin to their traffickers located throughout China. The heroin was refined by British East India Company factories in India using opium grown on British-guarded and subsidized farms in northwest India, today’s Pakistan, and in Afghanistan.

This enterprise is no secret. It was official British policy, seized on as a way for the nearly bankrupt empire to redress the terrific imbalance in international payments between Britain and China due to huge volumes of British imports of Chinese-produced tea. It sits on the history books for all to see as the greatest crime against humanity perpetrated by the British empire. How can the US Office on Drugs and Crime get this crucial history so upside down as to blame the victim of British drug trafficking and overlook the eerie repeat of this despicable history today?

In the Vancouver Police Department’s annual report released this week, we see that crimes involving heroin on our streets is up 43% over last year.