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When Mark Neufeld started out as a cop, he walked the beat in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside.

So many years ago but he can still name the skid-row hotels and the flophouses and the parks. He can still tell you of the squalor of the streets.

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Now he is Calgary’s new police chief. He always wanted to make a difference. When he talks about public service, he doesn’t sound phony.

His mom died when he was just months old. His dad became his mom but his dad was a hopeless alcoholic.

The folks in his hometown village of Ryley, east of Edmonton, raised him and one day he grew up to be a man who wanted to wear the uniform.

When he goes down to the Beltline neighbourhood around this city’s drug site at the Sheldon Chumir, he thinks: “It can’t always have been like this.”

Photo by Gavin Young / Postmedia

It wasn’t. Then the drug site came. The drug site was supposed to be for opioid users. But now it’s way more for meth heads. The users come in ever greater numbers. That’s 1,156 individuals and 5,789 visits in one month. More crime, more disorder.