Vancouver halfway houses, lack of police presence destroy

I’m sick of all these regular news reports of yet another rapist or violent criminal offender who just “walked away from Vancouver halfway house”. Alerting the community is good, but how about doing something proactive and preventative? Something is obviously broken with the current halfway house system and this needs to be fixed pronto. Another rent...VPD moved its Main Hastings branch to the west side in 2011, and just look at the mess in the DTES now...having 4 patrol cars doing donut run patrols is absolutely doing nothing for this city’s public disorder. Open drug dealing and just a complete eyesore. Clean it up! We can’t have ordinary DTES residents, people with kids afraid to walk through the DTES as an off limits zone just for meant for drugs. It’s not just homelessness but the sheer lack of presence of police in that particular area that is truly disturbing. Where the hell are the beat cops that used to walk through DTES?! It’s now just become a volunteer based “community policing” center that does squat.


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Sep 12, 2018 at 4:55am

Reality check, with the new generation, there is no work being done. Unless YOU do all the work, bring evidence (VIDEO you took), and tell THEM what the crime is .........they can't help you. Seriously, this is what I have been told. Obsolete is the word I think fits for police forces. On the West Coast, if you are criminal you are in luck.

Totally agree we have failed the DTES. But the system is broken on the medical side. We need to have accountability for the mental health professionals failing these people. Fire them all!!!

10 6Rating: +4


Sep 12, 2018 at 7:36am

Well according to the poverty industry...all these drug addicts and criminals are just down on their luck with a heart of gold and all they need is validation and a hug. As we can see that approach is making the problem 100 times worse.

10 8Rating: +2

I've worked front line harm reduction

Sep 12, 2018 at 8:46am

In the downtown Eastside for 10 years and lived here for 6 and it's gotten only better.

Move back to Burnaby where it's "safe" and you can't spot the poor people.

Went to Army and Navy

Sep 12, 2018 at 11:02am

On Hastings,Monday at noon.
Right out front,on the edge of the store property line,was three guys sitting on the sidewalk. Shooting up into their arms.

11 3Rating: +8

Im glad

Sep 12, 2018 at 1:15pm

that experts like you have all the answers to all the problems.

9 8Rating: +1

serve and protect

Sep 12, 2018 at 3:23pm

Just saw a cruiser put on its cherries to do a U-turn on main... to go get coffee.

But seriously - proofread next time if you want to be taken seriously.

7 6Rating: +1


Sep 12, 2018 at 3:27pm

I believe we can trace the majority of this problem, most especially the homeless issue, with the decision back in the '80's or '90's (can't remember exactly when) by the government at the time to close down places like Woodlands and Riverview. The idea was that de-institutionalizing people with mental illness would be so much better for them. I thought at the time that it was total bs, and nothing but the government trying to improve their bottom line. Sure enough, without replacing those institutions with sufficient other resources, thousands of vulnerable people were released without the care they needed. It's gotten worse and worse since then. We also have a ridiculous warm and fuzzy lax attitude toward addiction and crime here, to the point that Vancouver has become known world-wide as an easy mark for criminals. It's pathetic.

19 2Rating: +17

@I've worked front line harm reduction

Sep 12, 2018 at 3:42pm

No, you're desensitized, that's all. It's not better---how you can say that I do not know. I've lived in the City my whole life. The shanty-towns near Main and Terminal and then on the other side of the train station by Adanac, this is simply not something that happened even a few years ago.

It gets worse every year---maybe the Straight will not post this, but I'll try anyway. We now have "social housing" up the Number 8 bus route as far as Broadway and Fraser---there's a building this. Since this time, the Number 8 bus has become filthy to the point that it's basically like being in a homeless shelter. Do you think they're deep steam-cleaning those seats? I don't. Things like public transit are designed to carry around clean members of the middle class, they're not intended to cart around Buddy the Junkie whose major concern in life is shooting smack and/or drinking alcohol, who hasn't washed himself or his clothes in a month. And no, I don't care that Buddy is a victim of Society/Capitalism/The Patriarchy/Etc. He's not. He's developmentally disabled. How do I know this? I've had some pretty degenerate addicts in my family, but not one of them was so degenerate he'd wear filthy clothes for weeks on end, because these were respectable middle class addicts, not street people with developmental disabilities.

The problem is that the permissive "harm reduction" model doesn't allow, or even tolerate, the idea that people should be sorted---and you can do this with a simple visual inspection. People can learn to recognize things like fetal alcohol syndrome. If you have a homeless guy with obvious FAS, probably not worth allocating work-placement resources to him. But if you see a guy in his 20s who's just come from a bad family, who's otherwise physiologically normal, he needs help, ASAP, because he does not need to remain on skid row.

The problem here is that the do-gooders want to blame society/etc. for every little thing---the idea that there are some people with developmental disabilities who just never enjoy much quality of life unless other people serve it to them, that's just not going to jive with the regressive leftie politics that influences "harm reduction."

Biggest harm of all is policeman stealing the drugs you want to sell---no free market, state controls everything, but who owns the state?

19 3Rating: +16


Sep 13, 2018 at 3:06pm

Plus the Left rewards people for not having any personal responsibility for anything and reward them for being dumb/lazy/unthinking idiots. And punishes those who got to where they are by working their asses off.
I earned my money,I'm keeping it.

7 5Rating: +2

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