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Posts Tagged ‘VPD’

The flame screams out "Let me free!" photo courtesy of Steven Johnson

Today is certainly a big day for Canada at these games as the Womens hockey team will go for gold later this afternoon. Womens curling semifinals have just finished, the men will play later today, three Canadian men will jump in the aerials final tonight and Joanie Rochette will skate in the final flight in the ladies individual figure skating competition. Three more days of competition remain after today that are sure to also contain many Olympic highlights. As we near the end of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games, the retrospective analysis has begun.

In a piece in yesterdays Vancouver Sun, Jeff Lee notes the surprise of VANOC officials over the exuberant outpouring of national pride from Canadians and their enthusiastic support of the games. It’s nice that they’ve been pleasantly surprised, but it’s important to note that their surprise is at least partially a function of the huge amount of negative (often inaccurate or misleading) press coverage the games have received, both before and during their execution. As someone who is generally pro-Olympics and has put some effort into push back against false arguments from Olympic detractors, I may have spent more time than most listening to negative press. But if the organizing committee, by default the games biggest cheerleaders, were apprehensive that Canadians wouldn’t get behind winning gold medals at home and Olympic hockey, I think it’s fair to say that the negative stories had reached a saturation point.

Something else Lee noted that  illustrates this story very specifically is the handling of the Olympic Cauldron. Fearing all the press about protesters, VANOC felt the need to hide the cauldron behind a chainlink fence extremely far back from the Cauldron with a large phalanx of police officers milling about, both within the enclosed area (along with the lucky few who due to volunteering or knowing the right people are able to have an unobstructed view) and outside. VANOC CEO John Furlong said they were blown away by the desire of the people to see the flame. I say that’s baloney. The flame is an enduring symbol and being drawn to fire has to be one of the oldest human instincts around. I think VANOC had higher expectations of the numbers of protesters and demonstrations that would occur based on the media narrative and needlessly increased security based on that. The enormous outcry from the public about the cauldron forced VANOC to act, although their fix, installing a plexiglass section in the fence and constructing an elevated viewing platform is still wanting. Paul Sullivan writing in the Metro had a much better idea last week suggesting completely removing the fence, putting up a velvet rope and staffing as many serge clad mounties as needed to provide security directly around the flame. Let VANOC’s shortsightedness due to media distortions serve as a lesson to future hosts (I’m looking at you London.)

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I am a newer resident of Vancouver, and was only 10 years old when the Vancouver Canucks lost game 7 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs in ’94 and rioting erupted throughout the streets. I don’t have any direct memories of that event, but it is easy to feel the remembrance of that shameful incident this city collectively has as we inch closer to the one of the most anticipated hockey games this country has ever seen; Canada’s mens hockey team wraps up Olympic round robin play this afternoon at 4:30PT/7:30ET when they face the United States of America. I feel that it is no accident this particular game was scheduled for a Sunday, as opposed to a Friday or Saturday; liquor stores close earlier and I presume officials are also hoping that many revelers will remember to go to work Monday morning and restrain their intake of celebratory libations (a futile hope in my mind).

The nervousness of Olympic officials was put on display before Sunday as a jittery Vancouver Police Department made a request to the BC Liquor Control and Licensing Branch to order the closing of liquor stores city wide at 7pm as opposed to the typical time of 11pm. The order affected both public and private stores, but did not extend to off rack sales at pubs and bars. This measure was apparently in response to the events of Friday night in downtown Vancouver. The particulars of those ‘events’ are another matter. I was downtown on Robson and Granville on Friday night. It was busy. There were plenty of people in the streets. Many of those folks were drunk. As far as I know from my own anecdotal gatherings, as well as what I can find in published news reports there was no inciting event that turned the large, festive and yes, intoxicated crowd disruptive or violent. They simply remained a large, festive and drunken crowd; and that’s it. I am sure that there would have been some individual isolated incidents of assaults of varying natures, but that is par for the course for a weekend night on Granville Street. More notable to me is what appears to be an extremely low level of unfortunate events given the massive influx of people celebrating in the city.

There is no doubt that the police have been lenient in terms of enforcing public intoxication laws. I think they are to be commended for this. It is a good thing for police to be able to exercise their powers with a certain amount of discretion. If the police are becoming concerned that they levels of public intoxication are approaching levels that are becoming dangerous then why would they not begin to enforce intoxication laws just a bit more than the stance they have previously taken? Did we not spend an obscene level of money on security for reasons just like this? For his part, convicted drunk driver Gordon Campbell told CTV News the early store closures were necessary, saying:

“There’s a huge number of people downtown and we have to make sure everything goes well for everyone [...] I think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

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I’ve never been a fan of tasers. Way too many people have already died directly from these devices or were killed in an event that involved their use. They have been adopted very quickly by law enforcement (both in the US and Canada) with very weak and lackadaisical guidelines, and it seems these guidelines are breached quite frequently with little to no disciplinary action. I would even be so bold as to say that they’ve been a force that is responsible for elevating lazy police work. Digby, writing at her fabulous blog Hullabaloo is always on top of these terrible accidents as they happen and if this is an issue that concerns you and you want to follow it I’d suggest adding her site to your daily blogroll. Here she is writing about one of the stories I linked to above:

[...]the man had done absolutely nothing wrong, presented no danger, had made no threats. The officers merely thought he might be mentally ill. And he screamed in agony when they shot him full of electricity five times in two minutes before he finally complied. (Of course, by “complying” I mean dying.) Therefore, they said they shouldn’t be held liable for killing him.

This is the logic that pervades the taser argument: The taser isn’t harmful so we shouldn’t be held responsible for killing people with them.

Recently the Abbotsford Police Department released the findings of an investigation into the conduct of the Vancouver Police Department during an incident this past summer that resulted in the death of Michael Vann Hubbard, a 54 year old homeless resident of Vancouver. The investigation concluded, amongst other things that:

The two police officers had reasonable grounds to believe that they were in immediate peril of grievous bodily harm or death, [...]After considering the totality of the circumstances facing the two police officers, notwithstanding that there was a tragic outcome, the officers were justified in using force that was intended or likely to cause grievous bodily harm or death.

Vann Hubbard was killed after being confronted by the two police officers in relation to a search for a purse snatcher. Video footage captured at the scene clearly showed Vann Hubbard brandishing an X-Acto knife and continuing to advance towards officers who had their weapons raised at him. Something that I have argued on this blog about other issues that is also relevant to the taser issue is that when enacting and enforcing any policy a cost/benefit analysis needs to be conducted and adhered too. As you may be able to tell from my opening comments, I feel the costs do outweigh the benefits that tasers present. Even with that being the case, why are law enforcement officers not doing a better job of demonstrating those benefits? My understanding of the deployment of tasers is that they are to be used to replace guns in situations they may have been used in before the development of the taser. This seems like it was one the more appropriate scenarios where deploying a taser would have been reasonable. Why was that not the case here? Isn’t this exactly the type of scenario that tasers were designed for?

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