Vancouver police formalize street check guidelines, training to align with provincial policy
Credit to Author: Stephanie Ip| Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2020 21:19:01 +0000
The Vancouver police have formalized a new policy on street checks and police stops after criticism in recent years over a disproportionate number of Indigenous and black individuals being stopped by police.
According to a statement issued by the VPD on Tuesday, the policy was approved earlier this month by the Vancouver Police Board, to ensure it was implemented and training conducted by Jan. 15, when new provincial policing standards came into effect.
The provincial policy requires all B.C. police agencies to introduce internal guidelines that direct how and when street checks are conducted.
Section 1.6.53 of the VPD’s regulations and procedures manual details the new guidelines regarding street checks, and how decisions are made as to whether a check should be conducted.
Under the new guidelines, police cannot make a decision on whether to conduct a street check based on identity factors. Those include economic or social status, race, colour, ancestry, place or origin, religion, marital status, family status, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, or age.
Officers also cannot decide to conduct a street check simply because an individual shares an identity factor with an individual being sought by police. Officers must also ensure that the individual subject to a street check understands the interaction is voluntary, that they are not required to provide any identifying information, are not required to answer questions and are free to leave at any time.
The formal policy is one of six recommendations the Vancouver force agreed to implement after a 2018 internal report. Those findings came after the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association released freedom-of-information documents that showed police stops in Vancouver disproportionately involved people who were Indigenous or black.
Data previously released by the VPD also showed that 16 per cent of street checks in 2017 were of Indigenous people, who make up about two per cent of the city’s population. A total of five per cent of checks that year were of people who were black, which are just one per cent of Vancouver’s population.
The VPD had said the majority of its police stops are linked to repeat offenders or in areas where crime is more frequent, while other checks are to ensure an individual was OK, though no separate data was available to distinguish those checks.
In addition to the formalized policy, the VPD had previously vowed to add additional training, release street check data annually, appoint an Indigenous liaison officer, work on building links with the community and record data that distinguishes checks on an individual’s well-being.
The Vancouver police regulations and procedures manual is available to read online.