Vancouver police and playing politics with 'support' for harm reduction
Vancouver police and playing politics with 'support' for harm reduction
While raiding DULF and arresting its operators, the VPD claimed it supports harm reduction. Its history shows otherwise
Note: Allies of the Drug User Liberation Front will be holding a rally on Friday in support of DULF and to call out the raid and arrest last week. More info on that here.
Second note: As I am finishing writing/posting this, the VPD is raiding three mushroom dispensaries run by Dana Larsen, breaking from its traditional tolerance of the numerous dispensaries that have been operating in the city for years. The raid comes as Larsen pledged to match donations to DULF in response to the VPD raid last week.
Forty-three drug users now hang over the precipice of the unregulated drug crisis, suspended in the name of “public safety.”
The Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) was raided last week by the Vancouver Police Department, and two people — Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx — were arrested for operating a pilot project compassion club, distributing heroin, meth and cocaine to drug users.
Drawing from surveys of its participants, published at the one-year mark of operating as a compassion club in August, DULF claims a laundry list of benefits to its members, from improved health and a reduction in overdoses to fewer negative contacts with police and less exposure to violence. The group says there haven’t been any known overdoses on the 3kg of substances they’ve provided to participants.
After Health Canada denied DULF its application for an exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to operate the compassion club, the group began the work anyway, putting into action a common refrain for community-level work in the face of government inaction: “We save us.” In doing so, they carried on a long tradition of civil disobedience in the drug user movement to save lives.
And in raiding the space, the VPD carried on its own long history of suppressing those efforts.
Selective history
In its statement on the raid and arrests, police touted themselves as progressive and proponents of harm reduction. The department has “worked collaboratively with health and community partners for decades to support innovative approaches to drug policy,” the department claims.
The history the department pushes is one with highly selective truths that, presented narrowly, paint a portrait of harm reduction while ignoring the material impacts of policing on the ground.
In 2003, the VPD says, it supported the launch of Insite. This is true. It also sent a letter of support for Insite to be extended beyond its originally slated runtime a few years later.
But police spent the same year antagonizing another safe injection site (SIS) set up by drug users and their allies to respond to overdoses in a way that governments had, to that point, refused to do. (Sound familiar?)
In 2003, the VPD “continually harassed and put pressure on the 327 Carroll SIS, including parking police cars in front of the centre for intimidation,” according to the Global Nonviolent Action Database. “Police entered the facility to question and detain some of those who were there.”
Ann Livingston similarly recalled in a 2016 Georgia Straight article that the police cut off their lock and replaced it with their own.
Earlier supervised consumption sites, operated in the mid-1990s and early 2000s at 356 Powell St and 213 Dunlevy Ave, had similar experiences.
Tactics continue today
Before Insite, the drug user movement had long been running harm reduction efforts in defiance of the law. Every victory for harm reduction has been won not by the public health and police officials and politicians who often shower themselves in praises for it, but by those on the ground.
Through their actions, running unsanctioned needle exchanges and safe consumption sites that saved lives and prevented the spread of HIV, drug users normalized harm reduction efforts that, in turn, were suppressed directly and indirectly by police or watered down and professionalized by public health.
In 2002, well over a decade after the first legal needle exchange in Vancouver launched and after evidence had long mounted in favour of needle exchange programs, the VPD had to apologize for raiding an unsanctioned needle exchange run by the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) and claiming the group was involved in selling drugs.
And in 2008, the VPD blocked Bedouin Soundclash from performing a benefit show for Insite on location, with frontman Jay Malinowsky saying, “I can't comment on the back-and-forth that took place between the VPD and Insite workers, however, I think many people are aware that these two organizations do not have a great past relationship. From what I saw when we arrived, the police presence seemed overzealous.” (The Province, Nov. 4, 2008)
Livingston noted in the 2016 article that actions like loitering outside safe injection sites to deter drug users from services were likely tactics of individual officers and didn’t reflect the VPD’s policies. But the end result, whether imposed on drug users by the department’s policy or its police, is the same.
Those tactics aren’t exactly a relic of the past either. In one 2019 study, researchers conducted interviews with drug users in the DTES in 2016 and 2017, with participants describing being harassed by police while using or sleeping outside.
One woman told the researchers she didn’t trust cops “at all.”
“And I do think that they are kind of preventing people from using in safe places,” she said. “Sometimes they [cops] park their cars in front of Insite, and so nobody wants to be around there, right? So we're going into unsafe alleys and whatnot.”
This year, Pivot Legal Society and VANDU published their report Talking Back to the City: A manual for winning — and resisting — local drug policy, and the report notes a police presence continues to deter people from using VANDU’s overdose prevention site.
“VANDU’s board and membership comprise people who continue to be disproportionately targeted by police harassment, violence, and criminalization,” the report notes. “Minimizing police presence allows for the comfort and safety of VANDU members, new and old, to use the space and its services without fear of police interaction.”
Culture resists policy
Excerpts from that report and from the 2019 study point to the issue at hand.
“In 2023, we are up against two-faced governments that are trained to say the right things while quietly enforcing the same violent approaches to drug use,” notes the report.
A quote from a drug user in the 2019 study puts it even more pointedly: “I think they're [cops] a bunch of hypocrites. They'll say one thing and then say something else, or do something else, when there's no cameras around, right?”
The roots of this are clear when officers speak publicly — it’s a culture that acts one way even as the upper brass speak another way.
Among those who spoke out are John McKay, once the head of the beat enforcement team in the DTES, calling harm reduction a “failed social experiment” (Vancouver Courier, June 17, 2008). He was later reined in by chief Jim Chu. Another was former DTES beat cop Dave Dickson, calling it the most destructive policy in the DTES, which “has been abused horribly” (Courier, Aug. 8, 2008).
But while those can be dismissed as two individuals — and media officers said there was a debate within the force — the repeated election of Vancouver Police Union presidents who antagonize those doing life-saving work in the DTES provides a pulse on the broader culture. That includes then-VPU president Tom Stamatakis (now president of the Canadian Police Association), who claimed Insite and related policies created an “atmosphere of permissiveness” that had caused a “deteriorating situation” in the DTES. (Courier, May 11, 2007)
Co-opted harm reduction
The police “support” for harm reduction, a narrative crafted to score political points, is narrow and largely in favour of measures that scarcely challenge the status quo. The endorsement of Insite, tempered with suppressing other safe consumption sites, maintains police power to harass drug users unless they are using at the VPD’s chosen space and explicitly reduces access to what the department agrees are life-saving measures.
One part of the trouble with this is illustrated in a 2005 crackdown on outdoor drug use. Police said it was a public safety concern for people to be using outside, and instead they should be directed to Insite. But as VANDU noted at the time, there were an estimated 15,000 drug injections every day in the DTES, while Insite had capacity only for 600. (Vancouver Sun, Nov. 28, 2005)
While the VPD endorsed decriminalization, it was police input that watered it down. VANDU, in consultations for the policy, pushed an 18-gram threshold, which was then backed by the BC Health Coalition. The provincial government, in its application to the federal government, translated that into 4.5g, an amount that was already too low for many drug users’ usage levels, which in turn was cut again to 2.5g in the federal government’s approval.
The federal government said its reduction was based on the input of police across the country, who said 85% of their drug seizures were for less than 2g, with average drug seizures of 1.9g in Vancouver, 1.6g in Abbotsford and 1.3g in the RCMP North District. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police argued in 2021 for an absurd 1g threshold.
By clawing back the limit to an unreasonable point that doesn’t comport with many drug users’ realities and effectively renders decriminalization meaningless, police again actively maintain control over drug users. This social control form of policing, based in “broken windows theory,” is rooted in a false belief that disorder (such as loitering, public drug use, etc.) causes crime. The reality, however, is criminalization of unhoused drug users and deteriorating health of a population that is told to constantly move along.
Active abuse of drug users
Police attitudes toward drugs and drug users aren't limited to how they interact with harm reduction services. In 2003, the same year the VPD is now patting itself on the back for endorsing Insite, another story came out.
In January, six VPD officers took three alleged drug dealers from Granville Street to Stanley Park, beat them and left them to walk back shoeless. The officers later pleaded guilty to assault charges. (Vancouver Sun, Dec. 23, 2003)
Just a few months earlier, Pivot Legal Society had released a report in which 50 unnamed DTES residents made abuse allegations against the VPD. While it gained little traction at the time, the Stanley Park assaults brought attention back to the report. The Province published a three-page spread detailing three of those 50 allegations, as well as three recent court cases in which defendants said they were beaten by police. (The Province, March 16, 2003)
The judge in all three cases described police behaviour in one, in which they kicked a man arrested for possession of small amounts of cocaine repeatedly in the midsection, as “absolutely astounding” and “repugnant in all ways” before granting him an absolute discharge. In another of the three cases, the injuries were so bad a concerned lawyer took pictures of two men beaten by cops before they were released.
Among the three cases in the Pivot report was a crack user saying police picked him up and dumped him in Kitsilano after cutting his belt and taking his shoes off and cutting the laces. Another claimed he was jumped by three officers, handcuffed and beaten. The man said he was then beaten in cells until he passed out. His patient file from a subsequent hospital visit backed up parts of his account.
Police, however, dismissed the Pivot report out of hand, with one officer saying, “Just looking at someone sideways down there [in the Downtown Eastside] has the potential to spark a complaint.”
And when the RCMP was called in to investigate the allegations in the Pivot report, the VPD obstructed, with then-chief Jamie Graham not responding to a letter from the investigators and some officers refusing to adequately cooperate with investigators, despite a legal obligation to do so. (Vancouver Sun, June 4, 2005)
None of this gets into more recent allegations of abuse in the DTES and elsewhere, and increasing deaths in cases of police use of force and how that disproportionately affects people with mental health issues and drug users. It doesn’t get into the VPD and RCMP’s abandonment of women in the DTES to serial killer Robert Pickton, which a report found to have resulted from a bias against poor women, drug users and sex workers. Nor does it get into the actual effects of drug seizures, both for personal possession and for trafficking, how the illicit drug supply is as toxic as it is today because of police enforcement. The VPD claimed it didn’t target drug users prior to decriminalization, but in reality they were seizing small amounts of drugs an average of 12 times a day between January 2017 and June 2020.
In fact, suggesting police favour harm reduction is absurd on the face of it, when much of the harm that’s purported to be reduced is created by policing in the first place.
At the same time as suppressing decriminalization, police now echo broad sentiments that drug use is not a criminal issue, but one of public health. As put by a VANDU board member in Pivot’s 2023 report: “‘Public health approach’ my ass. Everything we do as drug users is treated as crime.”
The VPD brands itself as a bastion for progressive drug policy — but that’s all it is: branding.
In reality, police approaches to drugs and drug users can, at best, be characterized as harm reduction reduction. At worst, it’s harm creation.