How Crime and Safety Became a Key Issue in BC’s Election

In the summer of 2020, Safer Vancouver spokesperson Dallas Brodie proposed a way to improve public safety in the city’s Downtown Eastside: put all the drug users on a big boat and anchor it in the Fraser River.

“They can do whatever they want and use their drugs and yell and scream and fight but it’s not going to be near children [or] elderly people,” she said on the right-wing podcast The Social Ramp.

Railing against harm reduction, safe supply and safe injection sites while pushing to round up people she found unseemly, Brodie was deemed a fringe figure back then.

“You can be compassionate and still care about public safety,” said then councillor Melissa De Genova, while drawing a clear line between the two women.

Other critics of the way the city handled public safety kept their distance too, even within Brodie’s own advocacy group; shortly after her podcast appearance, Brodie told The Tyee that she was the only member of Safer Vancouver willing to speak publicly without fear of being cancelled.

Brodie wasn’t cancelled. Four years later, she’s back, and she’s backed by the BC Conservatives, standing as an MLA candidate in the affluent Vancouver-Quilchena riding, a BC Liberal stronghold dating back to 1991. And with the riding’s current MLA, Kevin Falcon, recently stepping aside to make way for her party, the former fringe figure seems poised to be elected to the B.C. legislature.

This August, Brodie came out against a proposed safe injection site at Arbutus and Seventh. “We must reject any initiatives that include so-called ‘safe’ injection sites, which would only serve to damage our community,” she said in a BC Conservative news release — proof of how far Brodie has come since her Safer Vancouver days.

In other words, her views on harm reduction haven’t changed much in the intervening years; the BC Conservatives are banking that enough voters have changed theirs. This election now seems, in large part, to be a referendum on public safety, which a majority of British Columbians feel has eroded under the BC NDP, according to public policy analyst Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, a public opinion research organization.

“People increasingly perceive their neighbourhoods and their communities to be less safe than they used to be,” Kurl told The Tyee. “So much of that has to do with drug dependency and the drug crisis, but also perceptions around what's happened around decriminalization.”

Are we really less safe? Not according to the numbers from Statistics Canada, which suggest that crime rates haven’t moved much since 2013, when the rate of Criminal Code offences per 1,000 persons was 73.5. In 2022, it was 74 — little material change. But these numbers may not assuage residents of, say, Kamloops, which led Canada last year in reported crime rates, according to Statistics Canada’s crime severity index, which tracks the amount of crime reported by local police, rather than crime that is charged. Same goes for residents of Chilliwack, Nanaimo, Kelowna and Abbotsford-Mission, which all landed in the top 10 by this metric.

How reliable and well contextualized are statistics provided by the police, who may be motivated to win funding and public support? Skeptics point to Vancouver’s 2022 mayoral election, when Vancouver Police Department stats showed that stranger attacks were occurring as often as four times per day. Later, when pro-police candidate Ken Sim had won, we would learn that police had neglected to mention how quickly this eye-popping number receded when COVID-19 health restrictions like lockdown were lessened.

Crime statistics are imperfect by nature, said Bryan Kinney, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University’s school of criminology.

“All of this Stats Can stuff is wonderful, but we know, for a lot of offences, between 30 and 70 per cent of everything that happens is not reported,” he said.

The way that we count these statistics changed recently, too. In 2019, crime rates seemed to spike. Police explained that this was largely due to methodology. Hot on the heels of the 2018 #MeToo movement, revisions were made to the definitions of founded and unfounded incidents. It showed up in the data, at least for one year.

Between cultural moments like that and the way COVID-19 rebooted the world, it’s hard to make much of reports that crime rates have risen or fallen. There’s too much to parse.

“It sounds very precise,” Kinney said, “but the numbers tend to get in the way of understanding.”

Understanding is harder to come by. A person using drugs in a public space doesn’t necessarily pose any direct threat to passersby. But the sight can stir strong emotions. Separating our feelings about public safety from facts requires context and nuance that British Columbians may not have bandwidth or time to invest, especially when much of our information comes from podcasts consumed while commuting to work, say, or drug use and drug paraphernalia are spotted or sidestepped along the route — troubling sights that took on new importance amid B.C.’s drug decriminalization pilot project.

For many voters, “this is the new normal in downtown Vancouver,” said Kurl. “Drug policy advocates and harm reduction advocates will go crazy to hear those kinds of characterizations, but those are the characterizations British Columbians — even if they at one point might have notionally supported decriminalization — have really pushed back [on].”

This is where we are now. How did we get here?

March 2020. Health restrictions imposed to curb COVID-19 played a pivotal role in changing attitudes on public safety all throughout B.C., further impacting Vancouver’s displaced population with tighter restrictions on visitors in SROs, fewer open bathrooms and closures of crucial community spaces.

As the streets became eerily quiet apart from the people with no place to go, some moved to spaces they hadn’t occupied in significant numbers previously, most notably CRAB Park and Strathcona Park, which turned into massive tent cities. Where once these dystopian scenes were relegated to a few blocks in B.C.’s big cities, out of sight and out of mind for most, these anomalous movements fed into a narrative of invasion. While public safety did not fall to ruin — crime decreased, per the counting stats — the perception of public safety began to break down.

August 2020. Initially, the VPD responded to increased concerns about the state of Strathcona Park by noting them politely, then going on to explain that they were actually receiving fewer calls to the neighbourhood than before lockdown.

What became clear almost immediately, however, was the difference between the perception of public safety and the reality. And that gap happened to arise at a moment when some voices calling for cutting police budgets were gathering strength.

December 2020. Indoors, many were glued to their phones and screens, watching the fallout that followed the death of George Floyd, the unarmed man murdered by police in Minnesota, who posthumously became the face of the surging “defund the police” movement.

In Vancouver, where money was tight through the lockdown, cutting funds for the VPD and transferring some of that money to health and social supports made fiscal sense — moral sense too, depending on whom you ask. City staff requested a one per cent reduction, bringing the budget to $318.6 million. Rather, the VPD board proposed giving them $6 million more.

"Regardless of the financial climate, the board and the VPD have a legal obligation to maintain public safety, prevent crime, apprehend offenders, and advance investigations," wrote the police board finance committee.

October 2021. VPD messaging shifted not long after that. One year (less a week) before the 2022 Vancouver municipal election, the public was warned of an uptick in unprovoked stranger assaults: approximately 1,555 in the prior 12 months, a 35 per cent increase since 2019. More than four people a day were the victims of random and violent attacks, the police said.

“Let that number sink in,” they wrote.

The numbers turned out to be bogus — estimates based on a small sample size during lockdown, explained away in a report they declined to share publicly.

October 2022. But none of this was known to citizens through 2022, when Ken Sim’s ABC party swept into city hall, promising funding to hire more police to address the disorder in downtown Vancouver. Stranger attacks, after all, were the defining public safety issue of 2022, according to the public safety minister, Mike Farnworth, and there were some truly troubling instances.

In July, for example, a woman was set on fire in the Downtown Eastside. You don’t forget something like that.

The sense of societal breakdown was furthered by Aaron Gunn’s Vancouver Is Dying, released only 10 days before the election. The documentary demonized the city’s “violent” homeless population, gawking at those with addictions and mental health issues, while arguing that the VPD budget should be increased. Its premiere was supported by Pacific Prosperity Network, an organization funded by Lululemon founder Chip Wilson backing right-wing political candidates.

It all went according to plan. Under Sim, the VPD budget ballooned to about $443 million, and proved that fear mongering could be a winning political strategy in B.C., especially over a complex, multi-faceted problem that has no quick fix — or Mayor Sim would have made a dent in it by now.

November 2022. Two days after being sworn in as B.C.’s 37th premier, David Eby announced a new program focused on protecting the public from repeat violent offenders. The teams tasked with the job included police officers, prosecutors, correctional supervisors and support staff working in concert. The move, said media reports, was a response to rising public concern about instances of former prisoners committing crimes shortly after release.

January 2023. Having first addressed the year’s defining public safety issue, Eby’s next big move was aimed at protecting drug users from over-policing, stigma and a toxic street drug supply that had claimed more than 14,000 lives in the last seven years.

On Jan. 31, B.C. became the first jurisdiction in Canada to decriminalize possession of small amounts of cocaine, fentanyl, heroin, MDMA and methamphetamine for personal use.

Few were impressed. Conservatives said the BC NDP went too far. Drug user rights groups said the government didn’t go far enough. The VPD was unprepared. The public was under-informed. The government didn’t quite seem to know how to defend its positions. Clarity was hard to come by. Frankly, it still is, and much of the benefit of this experiment was outweighed by more scenes of drug use in public.

October 2023. The province did try to bring in legislation to limit “the use of drugs in places that are frequented by children and families.” It was blocked by the B.C. Supreme Court in a big loss for David Eby’s BC NDP, whose critics called him reckless for decriminalizing drugs.

April 2024. By spring of this year, everything fell apart. A report of rampant drug use in St. Paul’s Hospital rooms drew considerable criticism from BC United and the BC Conservatives. Meanwhile, deputy police chief Fiona Wilson complained that police couldn’t do their jobs anymore, even at Vancouver’s best place — the beach.

"In the wake of decriminalization, there are many of those locations where we have absolutely no authority to address that problematic drug use, because the person appears to be in possession of less than 2.5 grams," she said. "So if you have someone who is with their family at the beach, and there's a person next to them smoking crack cocaine, it's not a police matter."

Finally, after weeks of criticism over drug use in hospitals, at beaches and at bus stops, the province announced plans to recriminalize the use of drugs in public places, an implicit admission of failure that Eby has struggled to overcome since.

"Keeping people safe is our highest priority," he said in a statement.

September 2024. Five months later, a pair of sensational stranger attacks shocked the province. One man was dead. Another’s hand was severed.

At a joint press conference, Vancouver police Chief Adam Palmer and Mayor Ken Sim made it clear once again that the streets of Vancouver would not be safe without a change in government at the provincial level.

“There are also people with mental health issues who are extremely dangerous that we need to be afraid of and we need to have institutionalized,” Palmer said. “And this person, in my estimation, is going to fall into that category.

Within days, BC Conservative Leader John Rustad, whose party had surged into relevance, announced his support for involuntary care. And then Eby, who two years earlier had raised the idea of compulsory care for people with severe mental health and addictions, came out strongly for changing laws to allow it.

Six days later B.C.’s provincial election period officially began and the polls showed the BC NDP and the BC Conservatives in a dead heat.

“Whether you live in Vancouver or not, you do not get over reading coverage about one person whose hand was severed and another person who was stabbed to death,” said Kurl.

“Staff can rule out that this is not normal. You can have all the stats and all the policy advocates in the world to push back against that, and I understand that. But we are now living in a world of politics, and it’s the election season.

In politics, said Kurl, “perception is reality.”

Next week, The Tyee breaks down BC NDP and BC Conservative platform pledges on crime and public safety.

---

Want to get even more of The Tyee’s election coverage? Sign up today for The Run. It’s a free B.C. election newsletter full of smart voices unpacking key issues, fact-checking politicians and exposing disinformation to clarifying light. Go beyond the horse-race headlines and subscribe now.