Make Vancouver Great Again: stoking fear and division with public safety rhetoric around the 2022 Vancouver election

Make Vancouver Great Again: stoking fear and division with public safety rhetoric around the 2022 Vancouver election 

Sean Orr

December 10, 2023

The 2022 Vancouver election was one that synthesised the collective anxieties of Vancouverites around rising unaffordability and perceptions around public safety. Like any campaign, there was a general atmosphere of negativity, namely around perceptions that the incumbent mayor and council were ineffective. What was unique however, was a rising tide of populist rhetoric that demonized the poor and marginalized and resulted in a culture of fear and division. 

Using  discourse analysis I will first offer a general background on police in Canada and the lead-up to the election which includes the militarization of police forces, broken windows theory, and reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement. I’ll then examine media accounts and the language used during the campaign, and finally look briefly at what has transpired since. 

While scholars and citizens alike have voiced concerns about the rising militarization of police in the US post 9/11, less focus has been paid to Canada where police budgets have been increasing steadily, especially since calls to defund them have grown (Rutland, 2023) Part of this lies in “barriers to accessing quality data on police budgets” (Seabrook et al, 2023) as well as persistent myths used to justify state-sanctioned violence (Phillips, 2016).

In particular, Brendan Roziere and Kevin Walby have noted discrepancies between media and police accounts of militarization and actual deployment data obtained by Freedom of Information requests. They preface their data by noting that “although militarization may be visible to the public when police adopt military-style equipment, the ideology may permeate police departments in less overt ways” (Roziere and Walby, 2017). This cultural dimension of policing is vital to help explain such discrepancies and why more militarized elements of police forces, like police paramiliaty units are often used in routing policing. 

Key among their findings is that “media sources largely reproduce the position of the police when covering topics relevant to militarization” (Roziere and Walby, 2017). This has a deleterious effect on public discourse, especially when debating police budgets. Consider this in the context of reactionary politics to the Black Lives Matter Movement and calls to defund the police. This had its most visceral representation in the form of the Blue Lives Matter faction, a revanchist “battle cry for a police offensive in the so-called ‘war on cops” which follows a legacy of uniting far right groups and rank-and-file cops (Shanahan and Wall, 2021). 

Blue Lives Matter was built off the paranoia found in anti-lockdown protests which saw a “marriage between conspiracy and capitalism” and manifests not just as an “assault on Black Life'' but also in its targeting of left-leaning political enemies that are all lumped together, socialists, liberals, communists, anti-fascists, and anarchists (Shanahan and Wall, 2021). This paranoid politics flourishes in “local reactionary strongholds, police departments, militias and the dark corners of the internet”, and the same is true for Canada (Shanahan and Wall, 2021). 

A National Observer investigation found right-wing operatives masquerading as local grassroots groups on Facebook spreading misleading information and running smear campaigns against local politicians (McDiarmid and Fawcett-Atkinson, 2022). Of course it's not just the reactionary right that perpetuates the valorization of the police. Landlords, tech executives, developers, and seemingly progressive wealthy elites all have an interest in proliferating the notion that cities are broken, not because of neoliberal austerity, rampant inequality, and multiple crises like housing affordability and a drug poisoning epidemic, but because of homeless people themselves. 

Edward Ongweso Jr. writes “This is the nature of carceral ideology: It cannot fail, it can only be failed. When crime goes up in areas with modest reform efforts, it’s the reform efforts that are to blame. When crime goes up—by roughly the same percentage—in places where no such reforms exist, Tough on Crime ideology and the lack of a robust welfare state or social services cannot be blamed. Instead, it’s blamed on a lack of churchgoing and oppressive liberal lockdowns” (Ongweso, 2022) . 

Indeed this is nothing new. Adherents of the broken windows theory have long called for increased police presence in areas that feature a prevalence of graffiti, panhandling, drug use and other facets of street disorder. The theory, posited in an Atlantic article in 1982, advocates for police to maintain order by cracking down on relatively minor crimes. This in turn prevents major crime by creating a positive urban environment. The theory has been the subject of intense criticism, including by researchers at Northeastern University who find little evidence that street disorder causes crime (O’Brien, Farrell, and Welsh, 2019).  

But the idea still persists and was readily touted by mainstream and social media accounts in the lead up to the Vancouver election. Twitter accounts that seemed to exist only to tag the incumbent Mayor Kennedy Stewart every time a window was broken popped up. One account was business owner John Clerides who lamented a city wide crime spree with “random assaults, window breakage, mass amount of shoplifting, theft, human defecation, people living on the street”. (Global News, 2023)

In that same article however, it is noted that “Vancouver’s overall crime rate actually dropped between 2020 and 2021, with a marked drop in property crime citywide — including double-digit decreases in commercial break-ins in all districts” (Global News, 2023). Of course, the stats seemed to matter little as I’ll come to later. The rhetoric around Vancouver turning into a lawless pressure-cooker as a result of progressive policies only ramped up. 

Sensationalist articles like this one were the norm: Six-storey wall next to Chinatown drug inhalation site now covered with graffiti (Chan, 2021). The only problem is that it’s actually a sanctioned mural. This didn’t matter to the author, it was unsightly because it wasn’t the right kind of mural. John Mackie writes in the Vancouver Sun: “But there’s so much of it, the whole corner feels overwhelming, kind of post-apocalyptic. And that’s the best of it — the graffiti in Chinatown isn’t anywhere as good” (Mackie, 2021). Post-apocalyptic is a term that comes up again and again when talking about the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, often called ‘the poorest postal code in Canada’, which I’ll get to in a moment. 

In an interesting twist, perhaps an example of what James C Scott calls a hidden transcript, the DTES wrote back: “Vancouver Sun reporter John Mackie cares more about graffiti removal in the Downtown Eastside — rather than the ongoing overdose crisis/pandemic deaths. Graffiti in the DTES is sometimes the only warnings street users get — as to the dangers of COVID19/contaminated supply…. Priorities.” (Cheung, 2021). It’s an almost direct rebuttal to broken window theory adherents, one emphasising the extent of community engagement and care that is found in the neighbourhood. 

Of course the pandemic seemed to exacerbate other aspects of crime and street disorder. Studies showed that COVID-19 exacerbated already existing patterns of crime in Vancouver, but also some variations in type of crime. Researchers found that “an exceptional event will aggravate social inequalities and increase these crime types in socially disorganized areas” (Andresen and Hodgkinson, 2023), namely neighbourhoods with lower socioeconomic status will experience increases in crime and vice versa.

Much of the rhetoric around crime seems to leave out the statistical anomalies that COVID-19 presented. Local business suffered with no influx of tourists, while social isolation had significant psychological effects, especially among those who are already suffering mental health and substance use disorders. In fact many businesses blamed out-control-crime and not the pandemic for their closures, which would embolden the pro-police right- wing in the coming election. 

Chains like JJ Bean took to the media to rail against street disorder and the failures of City Hall and the police (Penner, 2021). As I wrote at the time, “focusing on graffiti, or garbage, or needles, is purposefully and superficially glossing over these systemic failures and reifies the idea that this crisis is one of personal responsibility” (Orr, 2021). Left-wing magazine The Volcano went even further, tying the comments to ongoing gentrification, displacement and class war: 

“JJ Bean’s anti-homeless campaign divides the world in two: on one side, the dangerous and disorderly poor, and on the other, the respectable public. Police, as well as middle-class, citizen vigilantes like Bentley, are the thin blue line that protects the public from the poor, according to this story. It is a story that calls on the exploited to side with their exploiters, colonized with colonizers, workers with bosses, tenants with landlords – united against those who threaten to corrode the whirring gears of capital accumulation” (Krupp, 2021). 

This division, spurred on by sensationalist media and encouraged by the police, also  manifests in vigilantism. One of the most glaring examples occurred in July of 2022, when a gunman went on a shooting spree targeting unhoused and killing two. This was just days after American podcaster Joe Rogan’s comments about shooting homeless people in L.A. (Earl, 2022). Later that week a woman was deliberately set on fire in DTES (The Canadian Press, 2022). In August a leaflet was distributed threatening arson against those living in tents as well as the safe injection site Insite (Kergin, 2022). In Maple Ridge, a group calling themselves Ridgelantes formed to oppose a tent city (Shantz, 2019).

Jeff Shantz in the Mainlander makes the connection between these events and the rhetoric of safe streets in concert with state violence of street sweeps: “In each case, the brutality inflicted on unhoused people has been framed in a rhetoric of “cleaning up the streets” – as if poor people are refuse to be literally swept away. This rhetoric comes from sources that represent themselves as respectable, including politicians, businesses, and media, as well as from more obviously-alarming quarters” (Shantz, 2022). 

These alarming quarters include anonymous social media accounts that film and post addicts without their consent, but also in seemingly innocuous community safety Facebook groups. In one such private group called  Downtown Community Safety Watch the director of local civic political party the Non Partisan Association (NPA) commented “we need to start harassing these lowlifes”, referring to drug users and residents of low-income housing. (Press Progress, 2020) It fits a long pattern of what’s known as NIMBYism, blocking services for marginalized folks anywhere but the DTES. 

Other groups like Safer Vancouver also jumped on the bandwagon, targeting harm reduction services like overdose prevention sites, often lamenting that the DTES, a specifically delineated geographic area, was migrating southwards. The spokesperson suggested “people who use drugs could be put on a ship on the Fraser River”, which isn’t even the first time that idea has been voiced (St. Denis, 2020).

The DTES has long served as a stand-in for poverty and inequality. Often used to serve as a lesson on the ‘perils’ of drug use, there was even a tour that took school children to the area that partnered with the VPD’s media company Odd Squad which was shuttered after community advocates called it exploitative (St. Denis, 2021). On the flip side, the area has also seen examples of poverty tourism like the “social responsibility tours” which drug users responded to by hosting their own yuppie gazing tours (Berman, 2016). Another trope that is often cited is that it’s used as Canada’s dumping ground for homelessness (Chan, 2020), despite annual homeless counts showing otherwise (Waters and Basu, 2023). 

The dominant narrative of the DTES is one violence and depravity committed by the poor. But very little of that discourse is about how they themselves are victims of extreme violence by the state, or that poverty is in itself a form of structural violence (Allen 2001). 

In the lead-up to the 2022 election City and the police enacted a violent raid to “sweep” the street clear of tents and other structures which resulted in multiple arrests. Previous to that, so called tent cities were cleared in Oppenheimer Park, Crab Park, and Strathcona Park. As local journalist Justin McElroy notes, the Hastings Street encampment was the 10th high-profile tent encampment taken down by the City of Vancouver in 10 years (McElroy, 2023).

This is punctuated by an over-representation of police involved shootings in the area. 

The same week as the above sweeps, an indigenous man seeking help for a pepper spray incident was shot by police. Combined with constant harassment such as “carding”, or street-checks which target Black and indigenous populations at a higher rate (Carney, 2020), the confiscation of drugs with no charges prior to and during decriminalization (St. Denis, 2020) as well as an overrepresentation of incarceration rates among indigenous populations in general. 

The culture of fear that is promoted by the state, the media, and citizen groups reached an apex in the lead-up to the election with discourse around random stranger attacks. Although advocates pleaded that “the apparent increase in stranger attacks can't be fixed without more funding for treatment, counselling and safe drug supply” it fell on deaf ears (Culbert, 2022). The VPD launched a massive PR campaign that involved installing black and yellow billboards in several languages warning citizens “be cautious of strangers getting close or asking for help” (Correia, 2021). It should also be noted that while the VPD and candidates continued to warn of stranger attacks in the lead up to the 2022 election, they had in fact been on the decline since 2021 (Steacy, 2023).

The DTES is a way for us to shift our policy failures onto a specific group of people while ignoring the fact that it's really an example of capitalism working as intended. A thorough search would turn up countless editorials going back decades calling for it to be “nuked”, but for the purpose of this paper I’ll offer a select few from the past two years. 

John Mackie: The Downtown Eastside is a war zone disaster — stop ghettoizing it (Mackie, 2020). Wherein the author blames, among other things, political correctness. His targets also include a tent city which he claims “was about a fringe group of politicos manipulating the homeless”. This echoes familiar refrains that blame the crisis on non-profits and the ‘poverty industrial complex’, a perversion of the military industrial complex. 

Daphne Bramham: Chaos and depravity so normalized in DTES that there is no humanity left (Bramham, 2020). Bramham offers a litany of crimes, including rape, and evokes serial killer Robert Pickton who used the area to target sex workers in the face of a complacent police force. Although she offers us the following: “what happens every day and night is a stunning rebuke to the collision of social and economic policies that have led to this”, she fails to mention what these policies are and instead shifts blame onto social services, as though the very services that often are the last line of defence keeping marginalised folks alive are the real problem. 

Lynda Steele: Enough (Steele, 2022). Here we see the aforementioned debunked broken windows theory offered up before she frames herself as a victim for having to assist people dying from a poisoned supply of drugs. Again, the author mentions root causes- mental health and addiction- but stops short at blaming unprecedented wealth disparity and skyrocketing rent prices. 

‘It’s gotten worse and worse’: Gastown residents besieged by homeless on their doorstep (McIntyre, 2020). Here it’s interesting to note that the building in question is a former low-income single residency occupancy hotel (SRO) that was converted by developer Jon Stovell, quoted in the article, into ‘micro-suites’. The residents were “renovicted” and may have found themselves on the streets. Stovell is notorious for this and has complained about the DTES Local Area Plan which limits condominiums. 

This rhetoric finally culminated in a piece of propaganda called Vancouver is Dying by Aaron Gunn, who turned to film making after being deemed too far-right for BC’s conservative BC Liberals. Although it was released in the final days of the election, it received millions of views in only a few days, capturing a zeitgeist that was fuelled by populist dehumanizing rhetoric. The video was funded in part by Pacific Prosperity Network, and by extension local billionaire Chip Wilson. Wilson urged voters to defeat socialist candidates and endorsed Ken Sim of ABC, who ended up becoming mayor (Fumano, 2022). The two are long time friends, but Sim was forced to distance himself from Wilson’s reactionary politics (St. Denis, 2022)

Local journalist Dustin Godfrey, who made a two hour long rebuttal, distilled Vancouver is Dying as “a backlash to a set of things that simply haven’t even happened to any meaningful degree: safe supply and defunding the police” (Godfrey, 2023). Godfrey posits the documentary only serves to reify the neoliberal ideology vis a vis the policing of urban space in the service of capital accumulation (Belben, n.d.)

With all this in mind, it’s no wonder public safety was a main issue in the 2022 election. Of course, what is public safety? Car crashes kill hundreds of people a year in Metro Vancouver. As noted above, unhoused people experience daily threats of violence. Anti Asian hate saw a 21% increase, another legacy of the pandemic. When candidates, the police, and the media talk about violent crime going up, they usually fail to mention that the most common form of violent crime is domestic assault and instead focus on crimes of poverty (CBC News, 2022).  

The five mayoral candidates all had public safety as a priority. The NPA candidate Fred Harding, an ex-police officer, was probably most hawkish with language like “we need to stop the “revolving door” of petty crime offenders” (Warson, 2022). ABC’s Ken Sim, who ended up winning the election, promised 100 new police officers and 100 mental health nurses. While he has in fact hired 100 police bringing the total police budget to $373.4 million, he has so far failed to follow through on his pledge to hire nurses. (Gamage and St. Denis, 2023). 

Sim’s promise led to perhaps the biggest shock of the election. The Vancouver Police Union made an unprecedented decision to endorse local politicians, raising the eyebrows of advocates and legal experts. Political scientist Stewart Prest warned that “for democracy to function effectively, those who have that power have to be trusted by all sides of being impartial” (St. Denis and Kozelj, 2022). Pivot Legal Society noted that the VPU’s claims of being under-budgeted didn’t match reality and that increasing the budget would “detract from the root causes of crime — poverty, lack of housing, and connection to community” (Kulkarni, 2022).

Scholarly work on police unions have focused on the role that police unions have in stoking fear, division and reinforcing polarization. The ensuing construction of ‘blue solidarity’ serves “to repress racial justice movements that challenge police authority, acts as a counter to broader working class resistance to austerity and contributes to rising right-wing populism” (Thomas and Tufts, 2020).

Police unions in Canada have  increasingly taken to social media to improve the image of police and boost trust and legitimacy while simultaneously encouraging the public “to ignore media narratives and look for “the facts” from police sources” (Isaak and Walby, 2023). The VPU president Ralph Kaisers is notably combative in his rhetoric, from sharing an image calling frontline workers “grifters”, defending ABC councillor and police officer Brian Montague for wearing the controversial Thin Blue Line patch, claiming that there is research proving body worn cameras are effective, and saying special interest groups in the DTES take advantage of this marginalized community. 

While the origins of the Thin Blue Line symbol are contested, the most liberal definition is still a divisive line that separates order from chaos which further entrenches the racialized logics of the project of policing. Tyler Wall argues that “the idea at the heart of thin blue line is that the most routine mode of violent state prerogative—the police power—is imagined as always a defense of civilization, which at once means the “human species” (Wall, 2020).

It was this dominant narrative that spurred me to run as a candidate and to further unpack in this paper. I wanted to counter the divisive carceral rhetoric that incites fear. As I wrote at the time: 

Community safety happens when we become a community, not when we push ‘Us Versus Them’ messaging that perpetuates a divide. What we need are healthy, happy, and equitable cities. Cities with adequate housing, mental health services, peer support networks, treatment beds, green spaces, meaningful reconciliation, mutual aid, cheap and accessible transit, cycling and pedestrian infrastructure and so on.

Since the election there was a massive pseudo-militarized operation that cleared tents from Hastings street that saw condemnations from the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association the Federal Housing Advocate, and former UN special rapporteur on housing. The city has closed an overdose prevention site in Yaletown which could further endanger drug users. The school board reinstated the controversial School Liason Officer program, despite evidence showing that SLOs actually exacerbate crime and contribute to what academics call the school to prison pipeline (Samuels-Wortley, 2021). 

The VPD has since issued a report that attempts to audit non-profit spending in the DTES. Critics have pointed to severely flawed methods of the report and some have called it an example of copaganda (Press Progress, 2022). The VPD has since negotiated a 9% pay increase over two years, while the City of Vancouver cancelled a pledge to pay its workers a livable wage earlier in the year. 

Most damning perhaps is a brand new report that found “no consistent associations … between police funding and crime rates across municipalities,and overall, net increases in spending per capita are not associated with greater net decreases in crime rates” (Seabrook et al. 2023). If this is the case, then the rhetoric around crime and public safety was namely a performative exercise rooted in the neoliberal ideology of carceral logic. It underlines the idea that systems of control and punishment are vital to protecting the interests of the colonial, capitalist state and that any deviation from this will be met with scorn and violence.

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