CURRIER: Do we have the courage to let police clean up high-crime areas?

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Unless you live in our inner city you’ve likely become numb to reports of stabbings, shootings, beatings, drug dens, prostitution and fires in vacant buildings.

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If you don’t live it, you don’t see it and if you don’t see it you may not think about it unless you catch a news story about the latest ugly event in that part of Winnipeg most Winnipeggers don’t want to be.

For years, Sel Burrows was the voice of advocacy for the Point Douglas area and continues to speak out for the people of our inner city. He decries “community centres with no programs, drug dealers with no drug tip line and police patrolling Linden Woods when there are 300 outstanding warrants in the inner city.”

That doesn’t mean there’s no hope. Burrows points to some of the strategies he and others employed to help clean up problems in Point Douglas which were both cost-effective and just plain effective. He says the drunks and drug dealers were rousted out of Joe Zukin Park with minimal effort by police making the park once again safe.

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Burrows believes that with three successive (at least nominally) conservative mayors that there is little interest at 510 Main Street to address some of the inner city’s ills.

Mayor Scott Gillingham disagrees. He maintains that the City administration and Council very much do care about our inner city and downtown. He also has faith that the people who inhabit the surrounding neighbourhoods are not blind to the struggles of the less affluent, stating “Most Winnipeggers are compassionate.”

But there is something soul-destroying in allowing rot to continue as if it doesn’t exist. We all lose something of ourselves when our fellow citizens are suffering.

The residents of the inner city who are living under the repressive regime of drug dealers and gangs are, indeed, our fellow citizens. They deserve more than another report from an ineffectual social service agency telling us all what we already know.

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None of this is bulletin material. Nor are the issues unique to Winnipeg. Every North American city is facing similar crises. You know about it, whether you see it first hand or not. We’re often reminded that poverty is the main culprit but that’s an oversimplification and insults the overwhelming majority of low-income people who live honest lives. They’re just trying to get along, make ends meet and raise decent kids in lousy circumstances.

While Gillingham concedes much more needs to be done, there have been some small gains in the area of reducing the number of vacant properties. The Community Safety Team on buses has helped and the Downtown Community Safety Partnership has reduced reliance on Fire and Paramedic and police resources. It would be unfair to suggest that no efforts are being made.

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But tinkering and half-measures won’t solve the problem. It’s time for Winnipeg to get serious about ridding itself of the cancer of the drug dealers and gangs which plague our city and which prey on our young, especially the newcomers who are especially vulnerable to the lure of gang life.

If we truly want to show that we care about bringing health to the inner city then we need to allow the surgeons, the people dressed in blue, to cut out the cancer. We have a choice. We can wring our hands over the next report informing us that crime is a problem in our inner city, or we can dispatch the people who are in charge of law enforcement to do the things that need to be done. Our fellow citizens await our answer.

— Geoff Currier is a former Winnipeg broadcaster.

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