Michelle Gamage, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Tyee

About one-third of the Vancouver Police Department’s frontline officers hadn’t completed training on decriminalization when the pilot project came into force and small amounts of drugs became legal in January 2023.

B.C.’s Ministry of Health and Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General had put together a webinar called “Decriminalization in B.C.: Shifting to a Health Approach to Substance Use,” which they sent to police departments in December 2022.

The training was designed to get officers up to speed on the Health Canada exemption that let people 18 and older carry a combined total of 2.5 grams of opioids, crack, powder cocaine, meth and ecstasy (which is also known as MDMA).

The webinar was also meant to help officers understand what health-care options people who use drugs had access to and how to refer them to those pathways, the Ministry of Public Safety told The Tyee in an emailed statement.

The training was not made mandatory but was “strongly recommended” by the ministry.

According to the ministry, about 88 per cent of police officers in B.C. completed the training. The ministry didn’t clarify by what date those officers had completed it.

The Tyee is just learning about this now because it took 16 months for the Vancouver Police Department to release requested data about how many of its officers were trained on decriminalization.

In January 2024 The Tyee became aware of documents secured via a freedom of information or FOI request that revealed how, on average, only two-thirds of B.C. police officers had received training on decriminalization by the time it came into force in January 2023.

The Tyee wrote about those documents and reached out to the Vancouver Police Department to ask how many officers had completed the training in the city.

The VPD responded by saying The Tyee would have to submit an FOI request to get that data.

Data arrives after decriminalization ended

The Tyee submitted its FOI request on March 28, 2024.

B.C.’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act allows members of the public to access government data and records. Government bodies are supposed to respond to requests and make data available within 30 days.

Nearly one year and four months later, as well as after several followup emails from The Tyee — including one notifying the department that The Tyee’s next step would be to escalate a complaint through the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner — the VPD released the data.

An investigation by CTV about the VPD’s data on stranger attacks demonstrates that this is not an isolated issue. The VPD took 14 months to respond to CTV’s FOI requests.

By the time the Vancouver police provided the information, the province had scaled its decriminalization project back. By April 2024 the rules had changed so that the same small amount of drugs was allowed to be used only in a private residence, where someone was legally sheltering, or in an overdose prevention site. Public drug use was no longer allowed.

VPD’s belated data shows that the department’s rate of training more or less aligns with that of the provincial percentages. When decriminalization was introduced in January 2023, around two-thirds of the force’s sworn-in officers had completed the training.

By the end of 2023, that number had increased to just over four-fifths.

By April 2024, 83 per cent of officers had completed the training. That is slightly lower than the provincial average of 88 per cent of officers who completed the training, according to the ministry.

‘Health-based approach’ training stats

In September 2023, the province introduced Phase 2 of its decriminalization training, called a “Health-Based Approach to Drug Possession in B.C.” That training focused on “concepts related to substance use and harms associated with the criminalization of personal use of illegal drugs,” the ministry said.

Again, the training was not made mandatory but was “strongly recommended” by the Ministry of Public Safety.

Fewer VPD officers completed this training. By December 2023, about 43 per cent of officers had completed it, which rose to only 45 per cent of officers by April 2024.

The VPD has 483 civilian employees, who could also do the training. About one per cent of them completed Phase 1 and less than one per cent completed Phase 2.

In August, the ministry updated Phase 2 of the training to “include more information on the objectives of decriminalization and how to reposition substance use as a health issue.”

But it’s not clear if VPD officers are getting this updated training.

According to information received in response to The Tyee’s freedom of information request, the “VPD made these courses available to all sworn personnel until the legislation changed, at which point the courses were removed.”

The VPD did not respond by publication time to a followup question about when the courses had been removed.

The Tyee also asked for clarification on why the FOI response said the first VPD officer completed Phase 1 of training in February 2022, which is 10 months before the province made the training available.

Using discretion when policing substances

Dave Hamm, vice-president of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and a researcher with Police Oversight with Evidence and Research, said that in his view, the VPD have always used a lot of discretion when it comes to policing substances.

That can lead to marginalized people, especially Indigenous people, racialized people and women, being targeted for enforcement, he told The Tyee.

It also hasn’t helped the force take a health-based approach to policing substances, he said.

For roughly the last two decades the VPD have taken a “depenalization” approach to drug possession, which means they are more likely to confiscate drugs than to arrest someone.

Officers would often also seize people’s cash when confiscating their drugs, Hamm said.

Confiscating someone’s drugs increases their risk of overdose because they have to buy from the unpredictable unregulated supply again, Hamm said.

If someone did crime to buy drugs they’ll have to do more crime, or if they’re selling drugs to fund their habit they might use those drugs and then are at risk of violence from their dealer, he added.

Hamm said that while decriminalization caused a drop in drug confiscations, officers still had a large amount of discretion. For example, if they thought someone was going to sell the small amount of drugs they had, they could still confiscate the drugs or arrest the person.

Once public drug use was recriminalized, Hamm said, police started targeting people who were using on the street.

That’s frustrating because if someone is homeless they might not have anywhere else to use, or if they live in a small town without an overdose prevention site the street might be the safest place to use because someone will notice if they overdose, he said.

If the government wants to better control substances, it should legalize, regulate and tax all substances, Hamm said. He pointed to alcohol and tobacco, which are two extremely harmful substances that are regulated, so no one is accidentally poisoned, and taxed, which helps pay for health-care costs later in life. 

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