Last month, I wrote a story about police reporting a 10-year spike in break-ins to vehicles and businesses.

Not a good news story for the Vancouver Police Department, or the victims of those crimes – and there were lots of victims: Statistics for the first nine months of 2016 show there were 9,484 thefts from vehicles and 1,974 burglaries to businesses.

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Thefts from vehicles have reached a 10-year high in Vancouver. Image courtesy Vancouver Police Department

Why the spike?

Take a guess.

Hint: Think Main and Hastings.

As Police Chief Adam Palmer told me after a police board meeting last month, the crimes are typically committed to feed a drug habit. You’ve probably heard this before, which is unfortunate in a city where politicians have talked for decades about what to do about drug use.

I mentioned this reality in my last entry, when I wrote about federal Health Minister Jane Philpott and provincial Health Minister Terry Lake leading a news conference a couple of weeks ago in the Downtown Eastside to talk about the overdose drug death epidemic.

The statistics again: The B.C. Coroners Service says 622 people in B.C. died of a drug overdose between January and October of this year. Of that total, 124 died in Vancouver.

The B.C. Coroners Service says 622 people died of a drug overdose in B.C. between January and October of this year. Of that total, 124 died in Vancouver. Source and image courtesy of B.C. Coroners Service

In response, the public has heard that naloxone is being used by a lot more people, including drug users and firefighters, to prevent overdose victims from dying. There’s also been news about Vancouver Coastal Health applying to Health Canada to open two new supervised injection sites in health clinics in the Downtown Eastside.

Chief Palmer supports both initiatives.

But when I spoke to him last month, the conversation was more about treatment – treatment on demand, as he phrased it. And what he means by that is this: If police interact with a drug user who needs or wants treatment at that moment, that person can’t get it.

“We have a lot of great programs in place with Vancouver Coastal Health,” he said. “But the one gap that we do have is with treatment on demand. We don’t have a city where if somebody is addicted to drugs and they need help and they come forward to a police officer, or just want to self-report and get help, they don’t have anywhere to go – and there’s long waiting lists.”

I put the chief’s concern to Philpott and Lake at the news conference. Lake took the question. He gave me a long answer. I’ll first give you what he said at the end of it because I think it’s more on point to Palmer’s frustration.

“We are providing more and more opportunities for people to seek treatment through a range of options because you have to be there when people want treatment, you have to be there with the right type of treatment for that person,” Lake said. “So you need a variety of different options and we’re working hard to provide those.”

This is how Lake began his answer:

“We have increased the number of recovery beds, not just from an abstinence point of view but from a harm reduction point of view. We’re trying to offer a full spectrum of treatment options because we know that you don’t always succeed the first time. We’ve committed to 500 additional supportive recovery beds and we are on target to meet that in 2017. We have put $5 million into the Centre for Substance Use to look at research to help and to train physicians in dealing with addiction issues. So there’s a range of things that we have to do. We spend $1.4 billion on mental health and substance use. The federal government has indicated a desire to partner with us to increase the resources available to help people with mental health and substance uses. We look forward to what that looks like.”

So, apparently, do cops on the beat, drug users in the streets and motorists returning to their cars today to find a door pried open, locks punched or a window smashed.

mhowell@vancourier.com

@Howellings