Opinion: Vancouverites should vote for politicians who take crime seriously

Vancouver Police patrol vehicle in the Downtown Eastside. (Shutterstock)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Adam Zivo, a Toronto-based journalist and LGBTQ activist. He is best known for his weekly National Post column, his coverage of the war in Ukraine, and for founding the LoveisLoveisLove campaign. Zivo’s work has also appeared in the Washington Examiner, Xtra Magazine, and Ottawa Citizen, among other publications.

With this weekend’s municipal election, Vancouverites will have the opportunity to hold their politicians accountable for the mismanagement of their city.

Skyrocketing crime has left residents in many parts of downtown Vancouver fearful for their safety – and the mayor seems happy to ignore the problem while clinging to his discredited and ineffective policies. Vancouverites should give their votes to candidates who take public safety more seriously.

Most violent street crime emanates from the sprawling homeless encampments in the Downtown Eastside. These areas have always been rough, but recently the situation has gotten out of control. Day after day, week after week, news breaks of citizens being randomly attacked. Over the summer, during a particularly bad period, 17 random assaults occurred over the span of two weeks. Just last weekend, there was a string of attacks at Crab Park, which included five stabbings and an attack with a crossbow.

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Rather than show leadership and tackle growing crime head-on, Mayor Kennedy Stewart has buried his head in the sand. Earlier this year, he claimed that Vancouver is perfectly safe, citing statistics showing that crime rates have dropped for two decades. This sentiment has been echoed by some city council candidates, such as OneCity’s Matthew Norris, who tweeted in June that concerns about crime in Chinatown were being “exaggerated.”

@iona_bonamis and I cycled down to #chinatown to speak with merchants on their concerns and where they’d like to see action. We heard concerns about graffiti and cleanliness but also wide agreement that the neighbourhood’s safety concerns have been exaggerated. @OneCityVan pic.twitter.com/FWMddkLfDV

— Matthew Norris (@MrMatthewNorris) June 7, 2022

However, when the wife of an assault victim invited the mayor to walk through Chinatown last month, the mayor ignored her — but he did find time to attend a Mid-Autumn festival in the area, where security, live entertainment, and food trucks were present. He claimed that “brighter days are ahead” for the neighbourhood, but did not address whether securitized cultural festivals represent the everyday experiences of local residents.

Peter Meiszner, an ABC candidate running for City Council, takes issue with the mayor’s stance and noted that, although crime rates have been dropping in the city overall, serious crimes have been rising in parts of downtown. “Just because you feel safe, it doesn’t mean that other people feel safe. There’s also been a lot of downplaying of people’s concerns. A lot of gaslighting has happened to both people’s concerns and their neighbourhoods and how people are feeling,” he said.

Meiszner also noted that gaslighting and inaction about crime appear to be associated with socioeconomic inequality. “Many of the encampments that we’ve seen have been in marginalized neighbourhoods. I tend to think that that’s part of the reason why they’ve been allowed to persist for so long. If there was an encampment on the west side, I’m pretty confident that it would be dealt with much more quickly.”

Indeed, it’s hard to see Mayor Stewart’s “everything is fine” rhetoric as anything other than an out-of-touch privilege. The cruel reality of encampments and street violence is that they are concentrated in Vancouver’s most marginalized districts – which means that low-income, law-abiding Vancouverites have their safety frequently compromised while their experiences are denied by better-off citizens living in comfortable neighbourhoods.

In a recent editorial I wrote for the National Post, I interviewed Lorraine Lowe, executive director of Chinatown’s Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, about how crime has impacted her neighbourhood. Lowe is no stranger to helping low-income communities — under her leadership, the Garden now provides food and other outreach services to Chinatown’s low-income seniors.

Through this work, Lowe constantly hears about how local low-income seniors deal with street harassment and violence, causing many of them to fear leaving their homes. “Marginalized elders and refugees are living the horror here and these people are coming in and telling us we’re safe when we’re not, she said.”

“These seniors don’t have a voice,” she said, alluding to an important point — unlike the mayor, low-income seniors don’t have Twitter accounts and media connections that allow them to speak up about the realities of their lives. Perhaps that is why it is so easy for the mayor and some municipal candidates to speak over them.

In that interview, Lowe also said that at least one business owner in her circles had given up on reporting crime because he simply didn’t have time to sit on the phone all day. If this is true and at least partially representative of how local business owners are responding to surging crime, then it seems that official crime statistics do not capture the full extent of crime in the Downtown Eastside. This renders the mayor’s blind reliance on such statistics, in defiance of Vancouverites’ lived experiences, even more troubling.

Allowing crime to ravage low-income communities is a social injustice — and not just from a racial lens. Working-class Vancouverites are disproportionately affected by street violence, too. Unlike white-collar workers, who either work from home or are cocooned within their offices, service workers are vulnerable to on-the-job crime because they often directly engage with the public with little protection or control over their own working conditions. For example, in July a man threatened to stab a pizza shop worker who wouldn’t let him steal a pizza. Similarly, a 22-year-old delivery worker and newcomer to Canada was stabbed in the chest and throat just last month. These issues are compounded for workers who must take night shifts.

Meanwhile, safety concerns deny public space to those who need it the most. It’s easy to be blase about crime when you have a nice apartment or a backyard, but many residents in the Downtown Eastside don’t have that luxury. Wendy Stewart, a low-income artist who lives in a Downtown Eastside rooming house, said, “People are not in a very good situation and might be struggling with mental health issues and with financial issues. It’s 30°C in these rooms without air conditioning, and people living in front of our building get the smell and insects coming up from the tents, from the sidewalk.”

Rather than address crime, Mayor Stewart is fixated on buying and converting old hotels into affordable housing — but it’s a band-aid solution that just doesn’t work, partially because the quality of this housing is so abysmal that many refuse to live in them.

“They have to share bathrooms. There’s pest infestations. No air conditioning. In the summer, it’s like 30°C in there. People just don’t want to live in these homes,” said Meiszner, who also noted that the mayor’s strategy takes entry-level hotel rooms off the market, making it harder for low-income visitors to stay in Vancouver. Is it fair to create new cost barriers for low-income families who want to visit relatives in the city? Obviously not.

Meiszner argued that as an interim solution until more permanent affordable housing is built, the city should take the money used to purchase hotels and redeploy it towards building modular housing and tiny homes on city-owned land — this kind of housing would “give people dignity and help them turn their lives around.” According to Meiszner, there is nothing stopping the city from adopting this strategy, but the city has ignored it and is “going straight to the hotels.”

Meiszner wants to see more police on Vancouver’s streets but believes that policing should be accompanied by mental health support services. As an ABC candidate, he supports hiring 100 new police officers and 100 new mental nurses who can “work together to address situations where a police response might not be the right response – a lot of these are mental health issues.”

“People in Vancouver have a right to feel safe going about their day-to-day. We really need leadership that takes it seriously.”

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