The headlines last Friday in the cluster of newspaper boxes at the northeast corner of Howe and Cordova in downtown Vancouver said it all.

Three newspapers, three different exclusive stories all heralding our home as a haven for criminals.

The Province

had a front page headlined Chasing a Dragon, which told the tale of our failed attempts to get rid of an alleged Chinese mobster who has been in the country for over 15 years, apparently dealing dope and living off welfare.

The Vancouver Sun, not to be outdone, had fresh details about the Bacon Brothers, a well-known crime family in Metro Vancouver. That headline read: Brothers in Crime.

The Asian Pacific Post had an exclusive gleaned from an Australian report headlined, High Seas Mafia. That was a story about the infiltration of outlaw motorcycle gangs and other organized crime elements into the Pacific Northwest fishing industry.

Looking at the newspaper headlines, you could easily think you were in Colombia not British Columbia.

British Columbia is definitely the best place to live. For gangsters and drug dealers that is.

Not a day goes by now without a gang-related shooting - and before you can say ‘meth-lab,’ there are reports of retaliatory murders.

We have the dubious distinction of having over 25,000 active marijuana grow-ops in the Metro Vancouver area, and together with marijuana farms across the province, B.C. Bud churns between $5 billion and $7 billion into our economy.

Throw in our money laundering casinos, violent groups of teens, easy access to guns and the billions brought in by manufactured drugs such as methamphetamine and ecstasy, and we are now a Superpower in the world of crime, according to our national magazine Maclean’s.

So what are the cops, judges and politicians doing about all this?

Nothing effective.

The cops blame the judges for being too lenient.

The judges blame the politicians for not enacting tougher laws.

The politicians, well they are too busy thinking about getting re-elected to give a damn.

Sure there are announcements all the time about task forces and millions of dollars going toward fighting crime. But has anything really happened to make B.C. a safer place to live, other than ballooning overtime bills for cops and prosecutors?

The bottom line here is that local thugs and their international counterparts all know that crime pays in B.C. and that they can get away with it.

Police constantly remind us that taking down gangs is becoming virtually impossible because of their small, fluid structures which allow them to work independently in cells.

They have their own priorities, targets and operational set-ups, not unlike our Metro Vancouver law enforcement apparatus.

We have five municipal forces with an array of Mountie detachments policing the Lower Mainland, all with their own priorities, targets and operational set-ups

Did we hear someone say Lower Mainland Regional Police Force?

Did we hear someone say disorganized policing is no way to fight organized crime?

It took a massive terrorist attack in the United States before its compartmentalized law enforcement silos were broken down and reintegrated for the greater good and protection of America.

British Columbia needs a unified approach to fight the menace that stalks our streets.

If we don’t do something now, our province might as well be B.C., for Big Crime.