Police group takes aim at Vancouver safe injection site

[CHIMO]

The Canadian Police Association is urging the federal government to cut off all support for the controversial safe injection site in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Delegates to the association's annual general meeting in Victoria passed the motion unanimously on Friday.

"We've created this enabling environment that's resulted in a sense of entitlement among drug addicts," said Const. Tom Stamatakis, president of the Vancouver Police Association and vice-president of the national association.

The safe injection site may have been a well-intentioned effort, he says, but it hasn't worked out as planned.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2006/09/01/bc-police-sis.html

[MrPrax]

1. Moralists who talk the talk...

but in more than a century haven't 'walked the walk' -- as if law enforcement's strategy has been effective. If that were the case, then there wouldn't be any junkies or crime...but leave it to these civil servants, who unlike virtually any other civil servants, have the power to make public political comment.

They got the same problem as the RCMP -- their own studies show it's effective.

RCMP overlook scientific studies

The RCMP has shrugged off $1.5 million of federally funded, peer-reviewed research into Vancouver’s injection-drug centre, Insite, along with two $10,000 studies the police agency commissioned itself. In an August 28 news release, RCMP noted that “until research is completed, we oppose the expansion of the SIS pilot project.”

...

“The science is in, and it’s not rocket science; it’s pretty basic,” he said. “But it becomes political.…The RCMP hired guys they thought would give them what they wanted, and now they’re embarrassed. So they got their PR guys to write this for them.”

Townsend was referring to literature-review studies by SFU criminologists Raymond Corrado and Irwin Cohen. Their studies were leaked to the media, but the RCMP did not release them publicly.

...

Now the research has been published in seven peer-reviewed articles that appeared in such renowned publications as the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal, the Lancet, and others.

Georgia Straight

Cops have no credibility when it comes to drugs -- they neither have the experience or resources to deal with addiction. The attitude towards heroin is the same as it is with marijuana -- besides being completely out of touch with the public, they never have the science to backup their minimum claims or the guts to ever admit their wrong.