Login / RegisterVancouver riot leads to talk about a regional police force
Vancouver councillor Suzanne Anton says that the city’s experience with the Stanley Cup riot should spur discussions about the need for a metropolitan police force.
“It is a very good argument in favour of a regional police force,” Anton told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.
According to Anton, the 1,300-strong Vancouver Police Department was “hampered” by a lack of personnel to deal with more than 100,000 people who converged in the downtown area on June 15, a crowd that might have been handled better by a bigger police force.
However, the two-term councillor noted that Metro Vancouver may be too big to be served by just one regional force. According to her, there could be separate forces for areas north and south of the Fraser River.
“There may be more than one way of doing it,” said Anton, who is running for mayor in this November’s civic election.
Former Vancouver chief constable Bob Stewart pointed out that a regional force allows commanders to draw on more resources in emergency situations.
“There would have been more readily accessible forces,” Stewart told the Straight by phone. “If you have a larger police force under one command, the deployment would be more effective.”
Various estimates place the number of Vancouver police officers on the ground during the riot at between 500 and 700.
During the 2010 Olympics hosted by Vancouver, the RCMP–led Integrated Security Unit had a total of about 16,000 personnel. These included 6,200 police officers from the RCMP and municipal forces, 5,000 members of the Canadian Forces, and about 4,800 private security personnel.
The province, City of Vancouver, and VPD have announced an independent review of the preparations for and the mayhem that followed Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals.
Robert Gordon, director of SFU’s school of criminology, has long been an advocate of regional policing. According to Gordon, it will be “extraordinarily foolish” if the review of the riot doesn’t come up with a recommendation to amalgamate police forces in Metro Vancouver.
“In any other metropolitan area that is policed by a single police service”¦the planning would have involved the creation of a reserve of police officers drawn from around the region with common training, common policies, common practices, common leadership, [and] common communications,” Gordon told the Straight in a phone interview.
John Furlong, former head of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, and Doug Keefe, a former Nova Scotia deputy attorney general, have been named as cochairs of the riot review. Their report is due on August 31.
The Lower Mainland and Greater Victoria are the only major urban areas in the country that do not have a unified police service. Metro Vancouver is a patchwork of municipal police forces and RCMP detachments. Vancouver, West Vancouver, New Westminster, Delta, Port Moody, and Abbotsford have their own police, while the rest of the municipalities in the region are serviced by the Mounties.
Former Vancouver police officer Doug Mackay-Dunn, now a councillor in the District of North Vancouver, pointed out that big urban jurisdictions face complex public-safety problems that can only be addressed by one police service. “That police service, in my view, should be metropolitan and not the RCMP,” Mackay-Dunn told the Straight by phone.
Jim Van Rassel
Coquitlam BC
The RCMP have an inordinate amount of problems: many of these are due to the fact that officers are moved around the country from post to post. They are not so much a part of the community as they are an occupation force, and that shows in the force's culture. Similarly, the US has a lot of experience with large regional police forces, and the results aren't great. They have a lot more problems with police brutality.
Let's put the riot in perspective: at most, it resulted in damages of $5M. The social response to the riot was, despite the excesses, a largely positive thing: a community found itself assaulted, and fought back. A great number of people learned some valuable social lessons.
If we'd have deployed 5000 cops, it would have cost the same as the riot. If we deployed the cops for two nights, it would have doubled the cost of the riot.
I seriously hope that the Canucks go to game 7 of the Stanley Cup next year, because however it goes, there won't be another riot: the lesson has been learned. This is of far more value to society than an army of regional police on constant standby.
A pretty complicated and convuluted system in which to be forced to invest ones capital.
Do we really need MORE police on a day to day basis?
Most people are commuting from Vancouver to the suburbs for work these days...that's where the real jobs are now (Tech, Industrial, Public Service, Schools). The only people who work downtown are either in the Financial or the service sector. Vancouverites pay for none of their infastructure, and in fact takes tax dollars away from vital transit services that hold the rest of Metro back.
Keep the blame for the riot where it belongs - on Robertson's Vision.
The City of Vancouver is unique in British Columbia and part of its unique nature requires its own independent police force.
"What they really don't want you to know is that there are not enough Cops or RCMP to deal with things if it 'really' goes wrong. The bottom line, we the people could take back our country from the ruling 'class' with out too much trouble and they know it. In actual fact it scares the living crap out of' them'. JVR
Jim Van Rassel"
Completely correct. And this scares not only the bigwig class but the slightly larger class of bigwig lackeys. End corporate personhood. Restore the Old Law!
Obviously you've never travelled to Europe or Asia. British Columbia has some of the strangest and strictest liquor laws in the world. In Europe and Asia, drinking on the street at all hours of the day is entirely normal and there are seldom incidents. We can't even get a drink at a cafe here, for fck's sake. Drinking is not the problem. I don't know why people have avoided stating the obvious: People like wrecking shit. When you're in a crowd of several thousand and lots of people around you are breaking windows or knocking crap over, it might seem like a fun idea. The problem is not just alcohol, but rather, cramming thousands of people into a small city like Vancouver with inadequate planning and an inexperienced police force. While alcohol may have been a factor, it was not the only reason.
You wanna be revolutionaries better check yourself because it won't just be the "rich folk", police or the "bigwigs" who will bring the hammer down. We have non-violent revolutions regularly; it's called VOTING. Figure it out. No one's "scared" of you. We're prepared.
i would take the RCMP over the VPD hacks and West Van clownshoes cops anyday. RCMP are the only real cops i actually respect.
the VPD like to phone up the DEA and invite them here to do raids. they seem more intent on moulding our society to look like how they want it by enforcing certain crackdowns than they do actually serving us. i spent a week in main st HQ unfortunately when i was a witness in an investigation. the entire place gave off an eerie cult-like feeling.
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