The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) has formally approved a new policy that adds “Street Checks” to the VPD’s Regulations and Procedure Manual.
The policy was introduced in October 2019 by the B.C. government and was pending approval before it came into effect on January 15th, 2020.
That approval, by the Vancouver Police Board (VPB), came on January 7th, and the policy “applies to all police departments in B.C.”, according to an official VPB report.
VPD Street Checks Policy
Regarding street checks and police stops, the policy is not limited to, but includes the following guidelines:
- Police officers cannot stop someone based solely on an identity factor;
- Random or arbitrary stops are not permitted;
- That officers need a “justifiable reason” to demand or request identifying information;
- The term ‘justifiable reason’ is defined both for requests where the officer has a legal authority to demand the identifying information, and for those interactions (i.e., street checks) where the information can only be provided voluntarily;
- The steps an officer must take to ensure a person is aware of their rights during a street check;
- During a street check, the officer must have a specific public safety purpose to ask a
person for identifying information and must inform the person of that reason; and - The manner in which the recording of street checks and of any identifying information
occurs
The report notes that “it is important to reiterate the value of street checks as a proactive public safety tool.” It also notes that “there are many documented cases where a street check was ultimately the key to solving investigations ranging from property crime to serious violent crimes, including homicides.”
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The flip-side of that, however, are the instances where street checks and police stops are disproportionately used against racial minorities, consciously or subconsciously. This is specifically discussed in the VPB report, but not addressed.
The “Biased Street Checks” sub-section of the Concerns section defines a biased street check as those “conducted solely on the basis of race, social, or economic status.” Officers are barred from conducting police stops and street checks “based solely on the person stopped sharing an identity factor with a person being sought by the police.”
The key phrase here is “based solely”, which is to say that police won’t be able to conduct a street check on an Indigenous man because the suspect they’re looking for is indigenous, but likely can stop them if an officer claims he’s stopping the man because he’s indigenous and a similar height to the suspect.
The most prominent example of such practices gone awry is the highly-controversial “stop and frisk” practices in New York.
CBC News notes that a formal complaint resulted in the VPD adding more training and an Indigenous Liason Protocol Officer.
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The problem here, however, is not conscious bias. Overt racism is not nearly as insidious as subconscious racial biases. It’s arguably more dangerous for a police officer to harbour racial biases unknown to even himself than it is for him/her to be an overt racist.
Many of the fatal incidents in the U.S. involving police and young black males didn’t occur because the officers had a hatred for black people, they occurred because the officers were more suspicious of the young black males than they would’ve been if it was a young white male, and subconsciously viewed them as a threat.
The VPD is expected to release annual data regarding their street checks, so we will have to wait and see what happens here in Vancouver.
For more Metro Vancouver news, stay tuned to 604 Now News.
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