There's a photo on the front of The Night the City Became a Stadium, which shows a massive crowd stretching all the way up Georgia Street west of Hamilton Street.

The report by John Furlong and Doug Keefe offers plenty of information explaining why such a huge crowd showed up in that location to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final between the Boston Bruins and Vancouver Canucks.

But there is absolutely nothing written on the topic of legal liability, even though Keefe is a lawyer and a former deputy attorney general of Nova Scotia.

If you search the entire report, the word "liability" never appears.

I feel the report was written, in part, to protect the City of Vancouver from lawsuits. All the blame is placed on the rioters.

The authors overlooked the fact that senior VPD officials advised the city not to put a Live site downtown. Instead, Furlong and Keefe went to great lengths to suggest that people would have come downtown anyway.

Some operational problems were cited—such as the police LRAD battery not being charged and the RCMP loud hailer failing to warn people. There was a "slower than normal transition to tactical gear" after it was clear there was going to be riot. But no fault should be assigned to any individual commander, Furlong and Keefe maintained.

Insurance companies can try to recover their costs by suing those responsible for the damage. Merchants can also file legal claims for compensation.

In court if there are multiple defendants found responsible, there is a legal principle known as "joint and several liability".

This means that if one defendant can't afford to pay, the others will have to cover the cost. It punishes those with the deepest pockets. And it increases the likelihood that the plaintiffs will be compensated.

Let's say an insurance company decided to sue a rioter and the city. If the rioter was found 90 percent responsible and the city was found 10 percent responsible, the city would cover 100 percent of the damages if the rioter was unable to pay.

Put it another way—let's say, in some strange twist of fate, that a court determined a rioter was 90 percent responsible and the city was eight percent responsible. To add a new wrinkle to this scenario, let's consider that the Vancouver Canucks were found one percent responsible for not urging fans to behave better, and TransLink was one percent responsible for not preventing the transporation of alcohol on SkyTrain.

If there was a $500,000 award and the rioter was bankrupt, then the city could be forced to pay $400,000 and the Canucks and TransLink could each be forced to pay $50,000.

And this is before you add in the cost of lawyers. Or other potential costs, including punitive damages, which can be assessed to punish defendants.

As you can see, the city has a strong financial interest in not being seen to be legally liable for the chaos in Vancouver on June 15.

Keefe and Furlong helped the city in this regard by pinning all the responsibility on the "villains" who invaded the downtown.

There was no serious examination of the impact of the density of the crowd on the likelihood of a riot occurring.

The authors claimed that more police wouldn't have made a difference. And they refused to suggest that city officials made a monumental blunder by inviting so many people to come downtown to watch the game on big screens.

Most of the media commentary in the aftermath has questioned these conclusions. But if you look at the report as a clever effort to diminish the city's legal liability, it all starts to make perfect sense.

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter at twitter.com/csmithstraight.