No injunction: Emergency Oppenheimer Park meeting hears of firefighter stuck with needle, police swarmed, drug turf war
Credit to Author: David Carrigg| Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2019 15:38:09 +0000
Vancouver city management, Vancouver park board management, Vancouver police and Vancouver fire services all called for a court injunction to end the Oppenheimer Park tent city at an emergency meeting on Thursday night.
However, the camp will remain in place for now as councillors voted 4-2 in favour of working with the city to find housing for the campers instead of pursuing an injunction.
Vancouver Police Department deputy chief Howard Chow, Vancouver Fire Department deputy chief Rob Renning, City of Vancouver deputy city manager Paul Mochrie and Vancouver park board manager Malcolm Bromley told Vancouver park board commissioners — who hosted the emergency meeting — that the situation in the park was deteriorating and not sustainable.
Mochrie said the city’s homelessness crisis was worsening, pointing to figures that showed the number of people sleeping on the streets in Vancouver had risen almost 300 per cent since 2011 — to 614 in 2019.
However, the Oppenheimer Park encampment — that began in Oct. 2018 and had grown from 25 people in Feb. 2019 to 137 last month — is a crisis point.
Mochrie said that in the first six months of 2019 the encampment had cost the city $817,000 — including police and fire — and that staff did not support allowing a sanctioned tent city. He believed a court injunction was needed to end the camp, while acknowledging there was a lack of shelter space in the city.
Supreme Court of B.C. injunctions have been issued several times at homeless camps in Metro Vancouver over the past decade, usually based on the camps becoming a fire hazard. An injunction gives municipalities the power to remove the campers by force, as occurred in Maple Ridge in February, 2019. The last time a camp injunction was issued in Vancouver was in June, 2017, at 950 Main Street. An injunction was also issued in 2014 at another camp at Oppenheimer Park.
Renning told the six commissioners (Gwen Giesbrecht did not attend) that firefighters were “very concerned for their safety,” when they attended the site (between Powell Street to the north and East Cordova in the south, with Dunlevy Avenue on the west and Jackson Avenue to the east.)
He said that one of his firefighters had been stuck by a needle, that was “extremely stressful for that individual,” and that firefighters were now going into the camp — to inspect for fire hazards — accompanied by police. Renning backed an injunction.
Chow outlined how the crime heat map in the Downtown Eastside had shifted this year from the corner of Main and Hastings to Oppenheimer Park.
He linked a surge in crime in the Downtown Eastside to the encampment, including a 50 per cent jump in the number of attacks on police, a jump in gun seizures and what he called a “drug turf war.” There were three separate shootings in the area earlier this week that police believed were drug related.
“It’s not a sustainable model on the policing side of things,” Chow said. “We support an injunction in the park. The violence is destabilizing.”
Vancouver Police are renewing their concern about safety in Oppenheimer Park after the number of emergency calls increased 87 per cent from June to August 2019 compared to the previous year. This image shows some of the weapons and firearms seized from the area.
Earlier in meeting, Bromley reiterated to the commissioners his position that an injunction was needed.
Commissioner Camil Dumont said at he meeting that he would not vote in favour of an injunction.
“This is a very, very, difficult situation and I was clear (in previous meetings) I would not support an injunction,” Dumont said. “I’m not going to use my power to disappear people into the nooks and crannies.”
Four Vancouver city councillors also attended the meeting, sitting with the public. Over 20 people were registered to speak, including councillors Melissa De Genova and Jean Swanson.
A spokeswoman from Pivot Legal Society said that “injunctions do not end homelessness.”
Earlier in the day, De Genova said B.C. Housing and the provincial government had gone to great lengths to find housing for everyone in the park, but some people had declined housing and the number of tents in the park had only grown.
According to the city, 130 campers accepted offers of shelter last month, but there were still 120 tents onsite.
“Every day that this encampment continues, it’s a situation that’s not safe, and I’m concerned that will be serious injuries beyond what we’ve heard so far,” she said. “There could even be a death — we saw that at Occupy Vancouver — and that’s not fearmongering, that’s what we’ve heard from the Vancouver Police Department, as well as our city staff.”
Wet clothing hanging to dry at Oppenheimer park in Vancouver, BC Wednesday, September 25, 2019. Nearly a hundred tents dot the landscape at the park which has pitted various levels of local government and agencies against each other as to how best handle the homeless encampment.
De Genova said she hoped the park board would see the strain the situation at Oppenheimer has had on the city’s resources, which she would instead like to see used to address the overdose crisis.
“It’s not just about a death in Oppenheimer Park — that would be terrible,” she said. “It’s about serving the entire Downtown Eastside and also (about) finding the money for this.”
NPA commissioner John Coupar said he and fellow NPA commissioner Tricia Barker had requested Thursday’s meeting.
Coupar said the park board had worked well with the city during previous injunctions to remove people from the park in 2008 and 2014.
But the board’s seven elected commissioners, representing three civic parties, have already rejected Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s request to temporarily cede control over Oppenheimer to the city, and voted against city staff’s recommendation to seek an injunction this time.
Coupar, who was in the minority supporting an injunction, still thinks an injunction is necessary.
“There was no reason to change the jurisdiction at that time, I don’t believe there’s any reason to do it now,” Coupar said.
“Now that we’ve seen this increase in criminal activity and people aren’t feeling safe in the park, I think it’s time to move forward with an injunction. But I’m only one of seven votes. I can only advocate for what I think is right and see where it falls.”
At deadline, the meeting was continuing to hear from speakers.
With files from Dan Fumano