Community court opens on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

Canada's first community court opens Wednesday morning in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, bringing a different approachto justiceto one of the county's most troubled neighbourhoods.

The two courtrooms will deal with thefts, drug offences and other relatively minor crimes.

JudgeTom Gove said they will focus on root causes of crime, such as drug addiction, that lead to petty theft.

"Unless you can get people away from their addiction, unless you get them to address their addiction, we're not going to reduce the amount of crime taking place in downtown Vancouver," Gove said on Tuesday.

At least 50 per cent of offenders in downtown Vancouver have a mental illness, a drug addiction, or both, and many are chronic offenders, according to court officials. Thecommunity court, located at 211 Gore Ave., will cost about $3 million a year to run and will work with about 1,500 offenders each year.

It will give petty-crime offenders a chance to opt out of the regular criminal justice system if they agree to work with a team of health and social service providers to get their lives back on track.

In the new court, addicts arrested for theft might be assessed and given access to drug treatment, housing, counselling and other services to steer them away from crime.

Based on Brooklyn project

There are high hopes for the project, which is modelled on a similar court in Brooklyn, N.Y., called the Red Hook Community Justice Center. Similar projects are operating and being developed in England, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland and South Africa.

Greg Berman, the deputy director for the Centre for Innovative Justice, who helped open the Brooklyn court, said one of the keys is to make the justice it administers visible to the whole community.

"They walk by their local park every day and they see supervised offenders performing community restitution cleaning up crack vials, painting over graffiti. You would not believe the value of that in terms of neighbourhood impressions of the justice system," said Berman.

Community service sentences rather than jail time have some critics labelling these programs as "hugs for thugs." But research shows community courts reduce crime and save the justice system millions of dollars, according to Berman.

James Brodick, who also helped create the Brooklyn community court, said that since it opened in 2000, crime is down 70 per cent in the neighbourhood.

"This is a community that once upon a time was called one of the 10 most crack-infested neighbourhoods in the country, and gunshots were fired at night. And now it's a community where we just had an Ikea open up. So there's an economic boom, as well as people feeling safer," said Brodick.

Resultswill take time

B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal hopes Vancouver's new community court sees similar success, but he cautions that will take time.

"The conditions we have now in the Downtown Eastside and other parts of the city have been there for many, many years. So we cannot expect overnight success, but I expect, and I am confident, that this is the right way to go," said Oppal on Wednesday.

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside community court will be evaluated by the criminology department of Simon Fraser University. It will look at whether the court results in more successful outcomes for victims, offenders and the community, and whether it helps the justice system operate more efficiently.

But for Gove, who only has to walk a couple of blocks from his new courtroom to see the toxic mix of drug addiction, mental illness and petty crime in Vancouver's poorest neighborhood, the signs of success will be seen first on the streets of the troubled neighbourhood outside its doors.

"When I can walk from the new courthouse up to Hastings, and walk down to the Cenotaph and not feel like crying by the sights that I see, then I'll know we've been successful," he said.