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In December, the B.C. Progress Board reported that, in 2006, Vancouver had the second-highest combined violent and property crime rate of all major cities in Canada and the U.S. For instance, it had nearly 3.6 times as many break and enters as New York City, when measured per 100,000 people.

You really have to look at the price of real estate in the Lower Mainland and ask 'Who is buying?' says Supt. John Robin with the B.C. integrated gang task force.

forget everything TV has taught you about organized crime. There are no Mafia families, with mob bosses and capos pulling strings. If anything, say police, such a rigorous chain of command would be easier to fight.

Whenever you let your guard down, you're in trouble.

But the fact is that criminal groups have built their forces on the back of the flourishing marijuana industry which, until relatively recently, the province seemed to almost implicitly condone.

Indeed, B.C. towns like Nelson have come to resemble the remote hillside villages of Bolivia or Columbia, where entire populations are involved in coca leaf production. The bizarre flip side is that when authorities crack down on grow ops, it can hurt some small-town economies. Robert Smith, a 73-year-old furniture store owner in tiny Grand Forks, almost bemoans the fact that last year, police shut down several large grow ops. Because of that, there's more people on the street, he says. With the [forestry] job cuts and the clampdown on marijuana growers, we're a lot short of jobs.

This all makes authorities' failure to curb the growth of crime that much more troubling. Police and prosecutors have faced multiple setbacks at the hands of the courts recently. Few of those arrested by police for growing marijuana actually serve prison sentences. Meanwhile, the biggest blow came in March when prosecutors lost a case that would have seen the Hells Angels declared a criminal organization. Police spent two years and $10 million trying to prove that David Giles, a member of the Hells Angels East End chapter, and two co-accused had been involved in trafficking cocaine. B.C. Supreme Court Justice Anne MacKenzie acquitted Giles, saying the evidence against him was weak. At the same time police say existing legislation hampers their probes of major crime figures. In the course of the E-Paragon investigation, Canadian police required more than 200 judicial authorizations for wiretaps and warrants, while police in Australia and the U.S. needed just 12 apiece. And when the E-Paragon case finally goes to trial, it will surely be a huge ordeal lasting months. Yet according to Kiloh, several suspects arrested in Australia as part of the same investigation are already serving their sentences. Canada isn't heading to be that international beacon that it once was because our laws have not kept up with the realities of the world, he says.

But late last month a Surrey resident, whose house was searched and found to contain no sign of a grow op, filed a lawsuit with the B.C. Supreme Court arguing the bylaw is unconstitutional.