The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police is crying over the plight of the mentally ill and their tortured relationship with the legal system.

Jim Chu, the association president and Vancouver police chief, complains officers shouldn’t be the front line in dealing with the mentally ill and urges governments to “step-up” with services.

I was reaching for my hanky until I remembered that his group helped cause the problem by opposing attempts at reforming our drug laws and by demanding law-and-order budgetary increases that forced politicians to cut social services.

For the last two decades, police costs, judicial salaries and legal system expenses have significantly increased. Much of that money would have been better spent on mental health services and social housing.

Plenty of advocates said so but stakeholders in the criminal legal system refused to sacrifice their sacred cash cow — prosecuting the addled for minor, non-violent offences.

“Mental health” is often a euphemism for addiction and we’ve known since the last century it is a major driver of criminal costs.

Drug courts were created in the 1990s to deal with this because abandoning prosecution in favour of better health and social care seemed too radical.

We turned judges into health-and-social-services managers sitting in expensive courtrooms instead of a clinic or a church basement.

Good use of money?

Hardly, but less expensive than throwing non-violent recidivist addicts in jail.

It is evident drug courts are little more than a placebo — a sugar-coating to make the pernicious consequences of the war on drugs more palatable.

Bad laws and the lack of an infrastructure to support far, far more addiction treatment are the major hurdles to cleaning up urban blight and ending the chiefs’ grief.

A blue-ribbon B.C. Justice Review Task Force issued a report in 2005 saying there was a revolving door on the courthouse, spinning with chronic, petty offenders who were mentally ill and drug-addicted — the so-called “dual-diagnosed” or “multi-barriered.”

After a year of study, the group of judges, police, lawyers, health and social service players concluded street crime in Vancouver was out of control and radical measures were needed to combat it.

Their 134-page report urged a stronger relationship be built between the Vancouver Coastal Health authority and the legal system.

Sounds a lot like what Chu wants now.

“I think this is a revolutionary report,” said then attorney-general Wally Oppal. “For the first time in my memory at least, we have a workable proposal before us that involves all sectors not just of the criminal justice system but all our institutions ... The recommendations are enlightening and they are far-reaching ... We have to recognize that what we have been doing isn’t working.”

Everyone agreed it was time we tackled the underlying causes of crime.

Unfortunately, the solutions entailed Victoria reversing most of its spending decisions and pumping millions into the social and health services instead of policing and corrections.