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Editorial - Wrong target

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Winnipeg police Chief Jack Ewatksi says he will ask prime minister-designate Stephen Harper to rethink any plans he might have to scrap the national gun registry. If he is serious, he may have a fight on his hands.

Mr. Ewatski has been no stranger to controversy during his time in charge of the Winnipeg police force. He has had bitter quarrels with the union representing city police officers. Last month, he informed a civil trial that the police force has no policy of "zero tolerance" when it comes to dealing with domestic abuse. This may have come as news to a succession of Manitoba justice ministers, who clogged up the courts for years enforcing one. It may also come as news to the city's police, many of whom welcomed zero tolerance as a more effective and safer means of dealing with domestic abuse.

Mr. Ewatski is also president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. His position on gun control will sit well enough there, but not elsewhere across Canada where the registry is widely hated.

Even Canada's police chiefs have never been of one mind about the effectiveness of the national long gun registry -- handguns have long been restricted here. Partly that is because of the cost -- a gun registry that was estimated in 1995 to have a total cost at completion of $2 million is approaching a cost of $2 billion according to the auditor general, and many guns have still to be registered.

Women's groups, victim's rights groups and urban Liberals argue in defence of the program, but hardly anybody else does. Even the police chiefs themselves are, as a group, ambivalent, perhaps because they are well aware that the billions of dollars wasted on gun control could buy a lot of more obviously efficient law enforcement.

In Winnipeg, Operation Clean Sweep is a street- crime task force that includes 45 cops and has a $1.6-million budget -- or at least it did, since it may run out of funds later this month. Last week, the Free Press reported, those Winnipeg cops seized at least 2.5 kilograms of magic mushrooms, 1.6 kilograms of crack cocaine, almost a kilogram of marijuana, some steroids, thousands of dollars in cash, a stolen handgun and several other weapons.

All in all, it was not a bad weekend for crime prevention in Winnipeg, as even Mr. Ewatski might admit. This is crime prevention that could continue, could be expanded, with just a handful of the billions of dollars being wasted on a gun control registry that has had no effect at all on violent crime in this city or this country in the seven years it has been taking up taxpayers' money.