Yesterday we spent several quite helpful hours with
Kristin Hardie, Curator of the Vancouver Police Museum, who kindly assisted us
in running down some possibilities. One angle we were particularly interested
in pursuing was the fact that the investigation into the December 22, 1965 take-down
of MacLauchlan and his coterie of drug traffickers was three-pronged, involving
the RCMP, the Vancouver Police Department and the New Westminster Police
Service. Although we will be following up on Kristen’s suggestion that we find
out who the members of the 1965 VPD Narcotics Squad by contacting that agency
directly, we are also throwing the question out to our readership. Does anyone
in our far flung audience (Canada, United States, Germany, France,
Romania, South Korea, Russia, China, Ukraine, Mexico etc) know any of the
surviving members of that group of police officers? If you do, please contact
us via our home page information.
Somewhat of an aside: an
interesting document from 1969 that we came across yesterday was part of a
presentation by the Vancouver Police Chief and his senior staff for a budget increase
for all the major squads, including the Narcotics Squad. The brief featured two
sets of statistics in support of a budget increase – crime figures from 1960
and the same from 1969. In the case of the Narcotics Squad, drug arrests had
increased from 333 to 1232. Drug charges had increased from 347 to 879, a rise
of 154%. VPD senior staff were pushing for an increase in staff from 11
detectives to 17. The VPD Narcotics Squad in 1969 consisted of one Staff
Sergeant, one Sergeant and 11 detectives. The document estimated that the
average drug addict was responsible for about $180 worth of theft per day.
