Do police drug seizures make communities safer?

Heather Austin, Local Journalism Initiative

Today is International Overdose Awareness Day – a day to remember people who have died from drug poisoning, reduce stigma, and talk about what can be done to prevent more deaths. The theme this year is “25 years on. Still needed.” The day carries a lot of meaning in Nelson as our community continues to struggle with the toxic drug crisis.

International Overdose Awareness Day falls 11 days after the Nelson Police Department concluded a targeted drug enforcement operation in the city’s downtown. In a press release, the Nelson Police Department said the investigation demonstrates its “ongoing commitment to addressing illicit drug trafficking and its impact on community safety in Nelson.”

But when police disrupt a local drug market, what happens next? And does disrupting the drug supply necessarily make a community safer?

Dr. Dan Small is a medical anthropologist who has spent decades working in harm reduction, including in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. His connection to policing is also personal.

“My father was a police officer and a drug enforcement police officer. Just a few feet away from here I’ve got a, y’know, one of my most prized possessions, his badge, he’s no longer alive, but, y’know, I’ve got his badge…”

Small says he has long believed police can be part of the solution to the drug crisis, as protectors of both public safety and public health. But he says research into drug-market disruption shows enforcement can also have unintended consequences.

“The epidemiological scientific evidence around the impact of policing on overdose is clear. It exacerbates overdose…Heavy-handed interventions of police around supply-demand reduction can result in increases in fatal and non-fatal overdoses. It can disrupt uptake to healthcare. It is ineffective at reducing the supply of illicit drugs, which is its main goal in the community because of the resilience of criminal networks and all these other things”

Removing one supplier doesn’t necessarily remove the supply. Instead, people may find another source – and that can introduce new risks.

“If that drug dealer gets pinched by the police and is incarcerated, no longer a supplier, then the drug user has to seek another person…and then they seek a person with whom they do not have a relationship…and this individual does not have an established track record with the drug user in terms of what the specific quality of the drugs is, and so that means they begin to kind of experiment because they don’t know what they’re getting and they may get a drug which is stronger.”

Small says someone buying regularly from the same supplier may have at least some familiarity with what they’re getting. If that supplier disappears, they may be forced to buy from an unfamiliar source in an already unpredictable unregulated market.

But that broader research doesn’t tell us whether those effects have occurred as a result of this particular operation in Nelson. The Nelson Police Department says it’s too early to assess the outcomes of the operation. The department also says its own overdose statistics are limited because police aren’t necessarily called or informed about every overdose.

I asked Nelson Police how disrupting the drug supply could affect people who use drugs, including whether it could affect drug toxicity. Police referred those questions to ANKORS, which provides drug-checking and harm-reduction services in Nelson. ANKORS staff said they did not feel they had enough local evidence or statistics to assess the impact of this operation, and suggested the question be examined at the provincial level.

So there isn’t enough local evidence yet to say whether this particular operation has increased or decreased overdose risk.

NPD says it continues to work with Interior Health and other social-service agencies to support people experiencing mental health and substance-use issues. But the department draws a line between that work and its responsibility to enforce drug laws. Chief Constable Donovan Fisher told Kootenay Co-op Radio that “the police’s job is to disrupt the illegal drug supply and charge those involved, and other agencies are in place to support those affected by that.”

Dr. Michael Ma is a sociologist at the University of Victoria whose research includes drug use and harm reduction. He says if police interventions can have unintended public health effects, police should be following what happens after an operation – not simply measuring what happened during it.

“They are supposed to be peace officers, so if they were evidence-based as a civil service, as a social service, as the police service, then they would use what’s available to them, which is evidence-based research. They would do some follow-up, they would track their own numbers, they would look to see after we arrest people and take drugs off of the street, does that then increase overdose? Then they would have another mandate, not just so-called public order policing. Then they would have another mandate, maybe that they’d have to follow, which is what’s creating public health, right?”

For Ma, an evidence-based approach means looking beyond immediate enforcement results like arrests and seizures, and asking what happens afterward. That could include whether an intervention is followed by changes in overdose or other public health outcomes.

The Nelson operation was funded through B.C.’s $5-million community safety and targeted enforcement program, or CSTEP. The province says the program can support partnerships between police, outreach teams and social service providers. Police departments receiving CSTEP funding report operational outcomes to the RCMP. NPD says for this operation, those include suspected traffickers identified, street-level drug purchases, drugs sent for analysis, charges and convictions. The province’s response did not identify a requirement to measure public health outcomes such as drug toxicity or overdose.

But that doesn’t mean public health is entirely separate from policing in Nelson. Small points out that Nelson police already carry naloxone – something he sees as an example of harm reduction being incorporated into police work.

“The Nelson police carry Naloxone. So that tells me that they are a progressive police force in a way, and that they have the capacity to understand the points of connection between population health and policing, and that they can be not just narrowly defined protectors of public safety. They can be a part of being protectors of public health. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have naloxone.”

For Small, the question is how much further that approach can go – including whether a harm reduction lens is applied to enforcement itself and its potential consequences.

“I don’t want to be too hard on the Nelson police or on any police force, but they need the tools in the tool belt that other enforcement jurisdictions use, which provide them with more complicated analytical tools to approach their job that includes harm reduction.”

He points to police forces elsewhere that have incorporated harm reduction more broadly into their work.

“Smart policing involves including a population health, meaning a harm reduction lens. And if you look around the world police do that. The Victoria police in Australia have harm reduction pamphlets that they distribute, the Scottish police do, the UK police do. Y’know they have harm reduction officers that they recruit so this is largely an issue of the culture of policing in North America”

For Small, that isn’t about abandoning enforcement. It’s about broadening the tools police use  – and considering both public safety and public health when deciding how to intervene.

“I’ve always kind of had an optimistic sense of how it’s possible for police to be part of the solution, not the problem. And in general to move towards police being not just protectors of public safety, but protectors of public health at the same time.”

The Nelson Police Department says its operation demonstrates a commitment to community safety. The province says CSTEP is intended to improve public safety and community wellbeing. And there are immediate results of an enforcement operation that can be counted – investigations, arrests, seizures and, eventually, potentially, convictions.

But researchers say the effects of disrupting an illicit drug market don’t necessarily end when the arrests are made or the drugs are seized.

So what should count as a successful intervention? Is it the number of drugs taken off the street? A reduction in visible street disorder? Or should the calculation also include what happens afterward – including to the people who rely on the drug supply being disrupted?

There isn’t enough local evidence yet to answer those questions about this particular operation in Nelson. But both Small and Ma argue that public health consequences should be part of how we think about community safety. And Small says policing models elsewhere show that enforcement and harm reduction don’t necessarily have to be opposing approaches.

In Nelson, International Overdose Awareness Day will be marked this afternoon at the Rotary Shelter at Lakeside Park. The event, hosted by ANKORS and community partners, runs from 1 to 2:30. It will include guest speakers, an Elder-led healing circle, a memorial, naloxone training and community resource tables. The theme this year is “25 years on. Still needed.”

And as Nelson remembers the people lost to the toxic drug crisis, questions remain about what makes a community safer – and how we measure whether the interventions intended to do that are actually working.