Human Rights Watch is playing good cop, bad cop with the Vancouver police. The group praises their innovative plan to heal addicts, but refuses to back down from allegations of police brutality.

The international human rights group interviewed residents on Vancouver's downtown eastside last month. The group concluded a crime crackdown was brutalizing many injection-drug users and driving them away from local services.

The area once had the highest HIV and hepatitis C infection rate in the developed world. The numbers have dropped in recent years, but fears are growing that HIV will be once again be on the rise.

"We have always admired from afar Mayor (Larry) Campbell's own commitment to evidence-based approaches to the drug problem," Joanne Csete, an investigator with Human Rights Watch, said Tuesday.

"We were concerned if there was a major crackdown by the police some of that good work would be undermined and we're concerned about the rights of people who are vulnerable."

Campbell, a former police officer and coroner, said the city has not been able to document any police abuses. He said the report should be withdrawn and revised in a written statement.

"The ... report's unsubstantiated allegations, incorrect statements and flawed research cast a pall over the reputation of the four pillars plan," the mayor wrote, in reference to the city's strategy for fighting drug abuse.

The Vancouver Police Department has been harshly criticized on a number of fronts in recent weeks. The B.C. Police Complaints Commission received a stack of 50 complaints on Monday.

The complaints were collected by a law-reform advocacy group called the Pivot Legal Society. The group spent more than a year recording affidavits from local residents.

All 50 cases were signed and the allegations range from torture to illegal search and seizure. Police are dismissing the allegations, and said they had conducted their own investigation and found the group had fabricated stories.

Word on the street is mixed. Some needle-exchange workers said people feel safer with extra officers patrolling the street, but others related stories of police harassment.

Joanna Czapska, a spokeswoman with Justice For Girls, said that many young females are stopped and searched by police for no reason. She also said that they are sometimes assaulted.

"Girls are scared of police," she said. "One girl we work with went to live with a pedophile, a man in his 60s, because she didn't want to be around so many officers."

Former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy, who sits on the Human Rights Watch board, said there are many concerns that police are being too forceful.

Axworthy also acknowledged the city hasn't had much help trying to implement its drug strategy, which includes plans for a safe-injection site.

"A proposal (for a safe injection site) was put in March and they still haven't heard much about it," Axworthy said.

"That does underline for me everyone's preoccupation with SARS and West Nile when we've got a major public-health crisis."

Axworthy said Ottawa appeared to caught in a time warp, adding it was time for the federal government to get in step with the times.

"About 95 per cent of federal drug strategy money goes to enforcement," he said. "Clearly, a lot more has to be done with treatment of users.

"As a former member of Parliament I feel badly we haven't been more creative on our national drug strategy."

With a report from The Canadian Press