SURREY — “Are they gone?”

Gabriel Holecz swivels his head back and forth, scanning the length of 135a St. in Surrey, looking for police.

“They’re gone,” replies a friend, who did not give StarMetro her name. The pair dashes down the walkway leading from the SafePoint overdose-prevention site and hurries across the street.

Slipping between tents crammed together along the sidewalk, they duck through a hole cut in the fence behind. As he clears the fence, Holecz’s shoulders begin to relax, though his eyes are still darting.

At 55 years old, Holecz has been addicted to drugs for most of his adult life and has a lengthy rap sheet of minor crimes. Today, though, he could get busted for simply trying to get clean needles.

Holecz is under a spatial restriction order — a so-called “red zone” — as part of his two-year probation for petty theft and driving with a suspended licence. He tried to run from police, earning him additional charges for fleeing and resisting arrest. His probation bars him from entering a two-block radius along 135a St. between 106th and 108th Aves.

The area is known as the Surrey Strip. Along with being an open-air drug market and homeless camp, it also happens to be where Holecz goes to work. It’s where he goes to get food, access housing support and collect his methadone doses. It’s where his sister lives, where his friends live. In many ways, it’s central to his entire life.

Most mornings Holecz, who uses heroin about once a day, knowingly violates his red zone. He works doing manual labour under the table: renovations and custodial work for the most part. His jobs are located on the fringes of the red zone, but when he needs to inject, he has to go right into the centre to get to SafePoint, dodging the police cruisers that patrol the street from an RCMP detachment a couple hundred metres away.

“Everywhere I work is in the red zone,” Holecz says. “I have to. I gotta work, right?”

Holecz is far from the only person in this situation.

There is a growing body of evidence showing that red zones are not only ineffective but may actually contribute to crime and put people at risk. A study released in October by researchers at Simon Fraser University and the University of Ottawa slammed the use of red zones in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

“Absolutely these things are contributing to the problems with our justice system,” said report co-author and SFU professor Nicolas Blomley.

A soon-to-be-released report by Pivot Legal Society will add weight to that argument.

“Clearly (red zones) are being overused,” says DJ Larkin, a lawyer with Pivot and an author of the forthcoming report. “We don’t think that’s in keeping with the Supreme Court’s recent decision” that marginalized people have an inherent right to be in public spaces, Larkin said.

For their report, Larkin and her colleagues spoke to more than 100 marginalized or street-involved people in 10 cities across B.C. They profiled one large city and one small centre in every health authority region and also surveyed more than 100 harm-reduction and outreach service providers.

What they found is a system that routinely applies ham-fisted restrictions that make no sense in the context of people’s lives.

Someone arrested for drug possession, for example, would likely be released under the condition that they stay away from an area where drugs are sold, like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside or the Surrey Strip.

But those areas are also where harm reduction, housing, mental health and outreach services are concentrated. In many cases it’s where people live. The research shows that pushing accused people away from services they need actually increases the likelihood they will commit more crimes, undermining the entire purpose of the red zone itself.

That’s what happened to one woman who calls herself Lil’ One, who agreed to speak with StarMetro on the condition she be referred to by her popular pseudonym. She lives in a tent on the Surrey Strip and says she got busted for selling heroin to an undercover officer last year. It’s her only way of making money, she said.

When she was released, she had a red zone in place for the whole Strip.

“My doctor is here. The women’s outreach is here, the medical clinic. It’s like you made me go from being homeless to even more homeless,” she said.

Red zones create a cycle of arrest, breach, repeat — something Blomley calls a “revolving door” in the justice system. According to the B.C. Prosecution Service, cases in which breached conditions (including breach of release conditions but also breaches of probation, conditional sentences and court order) were the most serious charge accounted for 33 per cent of all cases in the province in both of the past two years.

There are situations where red zones do make sense. As defence lawyer Eric Warren explained, they are a good and often necessary tool for restricting the movements of an abuser in cases of domestic violence or other violent crimes, for example.

“But about 90 per cent of the time they are stupid,” Warren said. “They do more harm than good.”

Like many B.C. cities, Surrey is policed by the RCMP. The force has a specialized outreach team dedicated to policing and protecting the Strip. It’s a 12-officer unit that operates out of a mobile trailer in the centre of the 135A block.

StarMetro asked for an opportunity to accompany these officers during their patrols as part of the reporting for this story. Our request was denied.

We also requested an interview with the officer in charge of the outreach team, Sgt. Trevor Dinwoodie, but that request was also denied. Instead, Surrey RCMP media relations emailed a written statement attributed to the detachment’s Proactive Enforcement Officer, Insp. Shawna Baher.

“With respect to the vulnerable people in our community, like those who live on 135A St., surviving with addictions and mental-health concerns, we face challenges in policing,” the statement reads. “We do our best to try to find a balance in our legal obligation, our duty to protect and our compassion for those in need.”

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The statement said there have been “a few” people red zoned from the Surrey Strip for drug trafficking and violent assaults. The statement said all the people who have been restricted “are in the area to prey upon the residents and directly profit off of human misery.”

The force does an “extensive” background check on people it arrests to determine if they “truly need” the services located within an area restriction, the statement said.

A person under an area restriction ordered by a police officer “can be escorted to the facility they require,” the statement said. “They will not be arrested or charged.” Whether that means police would personally escort people in possession of illegal drugs to a supervised injection facility, the statement did not say.

Twenty-one days after StarMetro sent follow-up questions seeking clarification, there has been no response. The Vancouver Police Department did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Red zones can be issued in a number of ways, official and unofficial.

The first is a court-ordered condition connected to a bail or probation release. These conditions are meant to be used sparingly and only when crafted to fit the accused’s circumstances. Larkin and other experts say that is no longer happening; release conditions have become routine over time, chosen from a list and rubber-stamped by an overtaxed justice system.

The second way is by a police officer right on the street. They have the authority to arrest someone and, rather than hold them in custody, release them on what’s called a promise-to-appear. That can include a number of conditions, including a red zone.

Both Blomley’s study and the forthcoming Pivot Legal report found many police forces in B.C. are also issuing informal red zones — orders that are not connected to any paperwork or formal proceeding and thus lack oversight.

“Certainly police are imposing conditions that can be quite vague,” Pivot Legal’s DJ Larkin said. “Things like, ‘Don’t come back here, you’re not allowed in this area, I don’t want to see you in this area,’ etc. It creates a very strong sense of insecurity about where people are allowed to go or not.”

Squatting in the alley outside SafePoint, a man who would only give his first name as Lane said he’s been red zoned from all of Vancouver, where he normally lives. Lane said he wasn’t sure whether his red zone was official or not; an officer on the street told him he wasn’t allowed to stay in the city. Official or not, the order has left him homeless and he now lives on the Strip.

Larkin said that claim, being effectively banished from an entire city, was a common complaint among the people she interviewed for the Pivot study.

Spatial red-zone restrictions are often accompanied by orders to abstain from using drugs or carrying drug “paraphernalia” such as needles and crack pipes.

“Police in some jurisdictions, they confiscate harm-reduction supplies. They’ll take clean syringes and smash them on the ground,” Larkin said.

In the context of Canada’s ongoing opioid crisis, that kind of policing can cost lives, Larkin said. A number of people StarMetro spoke to said friends of theirs had died of an overdose after being red zoned from the Downtown Eastside or the Surrey Strip.

Red zones are “basically sentencing people to death,” said a man who goes by Diablo, standing outside Surrey’s SafePoint supervised consumption site. He also refused to give his legal name, asking instead to be referred to by a pseudonym. “They’ll go off (alone) and use dope in the woods, or in an alley and they’ll die.”

In the Vancouver study, Blomley and his colleagues were concerned to find that police, lawyers, Crown attorneys, judges and other justice-system workers mostly held the belief — despite the evidence — that red zones were reasonable, were being applied correctly and that they worked.

“One of the legal actors we spoke to said, ‘I don’t get it. All I see in my courtroom are breach of bail and breach of probation charges,’” Blomley said.

Like most pre-trial conditions, red-zone use is increasing, he said.

“Yes, they actually generate criminal statistics,” Blomley said. “But they’re not ‘crime’ in the way most people would understand them.”

That’s because it’s not inherently illegal to stand in the middle of Surrey’s 135A St. or visit the nearby food bank unless a court or a police officer has ordered you not to. Pre-trial release conditions create crimes out of marginalized people’s daily lives, Blomley said.

So why are they still being used? A soon-to-be-released update to the October study by Blomley and one of his co-authors, University of Ottawa professor Marie-Eve Sylvestre, helps shed some light.

The pair examined how red zones are used in Montreal. They found many of the same problems associated with red zone use in Vancouver are also common there, with one surprising exception. Unlike legal actors in the Vancouver justice system, those in Montreal largely agreed that red zones are ineffective.

“They knew they were putting people at risk of failure,” Sylvestre said. “But they felt quite limited in terms of the tools that they are able to use.”

For example, Sylvestre said many workers in the Montreal system seemed open to crafting more carefully circumscribed probation orders, like requiring someone go to a harm-reduction service like SafePoint, or follow a prescribed program to first stabilize and then slowly reduce their drug use.

“But they can’t include that order,” Sylvestre said, “because consuming drugs is illegal, so that’s just not an option.”

Jesse Winter is an investigative reporter and photographer based in Vancouver. He can be reached at jesse.winter@metronews.ca

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