Vancouver police find 60 to blame for Stanley Cup riot

After a four-months-and-counting investigation that involved scores of officers and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Vancouver police finally got around to recommending charges in connection with the 2011 Stanley Cup riot.

Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu said Monday that a total of 163 charges are being recommended by police against 60 suspected rioters. And the news came with the promise of hundreds more to come.

The announcement follows what the police chief vowed is the most extensive criminal probe ever launched by his department. More than 5,000 hours of digital imagery were viewed by 50 forensic analysts representing 40 law-enforcement agencies from across North America and the United Kingdom.

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Vancouver blasts NHL for lacking anti-riot strategy

The city’s own review of the June 15 Stanley Cup riot rips into the National Hockey League for its alleged hands-off attitude to potentially rowdy playoff celebrations.

“In spite of four Stanley Cup riots in the last five years, [the NHL] has no approach, no policy and no apparent strategy to work with host franchises and municipalities on this issue,” says the lengthy internal report to be debated at a special council meeting on Tuesday.

“[This] clearly … threatens the value and perception of their brand.”

The city’s criticism of the NHL follows similar barbs tossed at the league by the provincially appointment independent review of the riot, headed by co-chairs Douglas Keefe and John Furlong.

In their report released last week, they said it was “unfortunate and regrettable” that the NHL has no specific programs to help teams “with the kind of challenge [Vancouver] faced that night.”

Concluding that the sport of professional hockey, itself, cannot be separated from the riot, they urged the NHL to work with teams and communities to promote “peaceful, happy hockey celebrations.”

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Vancouver police chief challenges riot critic’s credibility

On the defensive over planning and response to last week’s Stanley Cup riot, Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu has launched an attack on one of his most outspoken critics.

In an internal e-mail to VPD staff – provided to the media on Tuesday – Mr. Chu took aim at the person widely identified by the media in recent days as an investigator of the 1994 Stanley Cup riot for the B.C. Police Commission.

In several interviews and news stories, Bob Whitelaw was critical of the VPD’s riot readiness. He also said the department ignored several recommendations made in the ’94 report that looked into errors made by police in responding to the Stanley Cup riot that year.

The provincial government has launched an independent review to determine whether the recommendations were followed and how well the police and the city planned for crowd control when more than 100,000 people were expected to pour into the downtown core to watch the game on massive, open-air screens.

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B.C. Premier promises to expose rioters to public gaze

B.C. Premier Christy Clark has asked spectators who took videos and photos of the looting, vandalism and violence to let the police see what they have.

“I’d like to make this call out to everybody who may have some evidence for police,” Ms. Clark told reporters Thursday before walking through the streets with boarded-up storefronts and burnt out vehicles. “Make sure we see those pictures of the people that incited this.”

Ms. Clark also had a message for those who were involved in breaking windows and grabbing merchandise from the stores.

“If you were a part of this, and I’m speaking to people who may have been responsible last night, I promise you this. You won’t be able to live in anonymity, you won’t be behind your bandana or under your hoodie.

“We are going to do everything we can to make sure the public understands who you were. Your family, your friends, your employer will know you were a part of it. Because this cannot happen in our city. It isn’t the kind of city that I want to live in,” she said.

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Looks like provocateurs to me. Tom

The Vancouver Experiment

Does It Work?

By Matthew Power

One study of Vancouver's injection-drug users has taken harm reduction to a level even beyond Insite. In 2003, the same year that the supervised-injection site opened its doors, an epidemiologist named Martin Schecter began planning a trial that had never been conducted in North America: heroin maintenance. Would a daily course of heroin, administered in a clinical setting, release users from the destructive aspects of maintaining their addiction? Would it benefit society and allow users to stabilize their lives? Similar studies had been conducted in Europe with positive results. Switzerland alone has 38 heroin maintenance centers, and they are a fully integrated part of its national health system; Germany followed suit last year. Schecter, who has worked in Vancouver since the first signs of the AIDS epidemic in 1983, wanted to see whether such a program would make a difference in Canada.

For the neighborhood's recovering addicts, the ability to escape the daily demands of supporting an addiction is often achieved with a dose of methadone. Methadone's relative benefits are well established: It is slow-acting. It greatly reduces cravings for heroin and blocks heroin's euphoric effects. When successful, methadone maintenance can give addicts their lives back. But there are high rates of relapse among long-term addicts.

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Drug-fueled gang wars shake Vancouver

By Patrick Oppmann
CNN

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (CNN) -- When Canadian cocaine smuggler Charles Lai was being sentenced in a Seattle federal courtroom last month, the judge sending him to prison for 13 years offered a small item of good news.

A suspected gang member in Vancouver is taken out of a bar in handcuffs.

At least behind bars, Judge James Robart said, drug smuggler Lai would not become another fatality in Vancouver's gang wars.

Authorities in Vancouver, just 30 miles from the border, are struggling to deal with the boom in the drug trade between the United States and Canada, along with the violence that has come with it.

Cocaine from Mexico -- and many of the guns that fuel the violence -- come north via the United States. Canadian smugglers then bring south high-quality marijuana known as "BC Bud" and synthetic drugs like methamphetamine. A recent U.N. drug report named Canada as the "primary" supplier of Ecstasy to the United States.

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This won't help the Vancouver real estate market. Tom

Vancouver's Radical Approach to Drugs: Let Junkies Be Junkies

By Vince Beiser, Miller-McCune Magazine. Posted November 18, 2008.

Welcome to North America's only officially sanctioned "supervised injection site."

Miller-McCune magazine and Miller-McCune.com draw on academic research and other definitive sources to provide reasoned policy options and solutions for today's pressing issues.

On a chilly, overcast morning in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, a steady trickle of sallow-faced drug addicts shambles up to a storefront painted with flowers and the words "Welcome to Insite." One by one, they ring the doorbell and are buzzed into a tidy reception area staffed by smiling volunteers.

The junkies come here almost around the clock, seven days a week. Some just grab a fistful of clean syringes from one of the buckets by the door and head out again. But about 600 times a day, others walk in with pocketfuls of heroin, cocaine or speed that they've scored out on the street; sign in; go to a clean, well-lit room lined with stainless steel booths; and, under the protective watch of two nurses, shoot their drugs into their veins.

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