The police chief of Sarnia is one of many in this country who has to be the face of a justice system that’s failing for reasons largely outside his control.

His city, like nearly every other city here, has seen its once-friendly green spaces turn into drug-fuelled sites of yelling, scattered feces and strewn-about needles. It’s only natural that the people are fed up, and since the parties most responsible for this mess — lenient judges and federal authorities too busy fretting over nicotine and alcohol to worry about the hard-drug free-for-all they enabled — live far outside the communities they’ve devastated, it falls to him to answer for the desperate state of things.