ABC Vancouver party promises hiring 200 more police officers and nurses

Ken Sim's ABC Vancouver party promises 200 more police officers and mental health nurses

Hastings Street encampment in the Downtown Eastside. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

The ABC Vancouver party has made its first major election campaign platform promise of hiring 200 additional public safety and healthcare workers to help address the city’s quickly deteriorating public disorder and mental health crisis.

This entails hiring 100 additional officers under the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), and 100 mental health nurses.

Such a workforce expansion would be carried out as an expansion of the Car 87/88 program, which deploys an officer and a mental health nurse paired together in an unmarked police car to “assess and manage” non-emergency or crisis situations.

The program has been around since 1978, and it currently sees about 200 requests each month to attend non-emergency incidents for people in a mental health crisis.

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“This announcement represents a significant investment in community safety,” said Ken Sim, who is the mayoral candidate for ABC.

“The Car 87/88 program demonstrates the types of collaboration that can happen between different levels of government when different agencies work together to deliver improved outcomes. This model has now been adopted all over the world, and an ABC Vancouver majority will expand the program and make it available 24 hours a day.”

Sim adds that proven successful programs like Car 87/88 should be expanded, and this is aligned with the VPD’s April 2021 request of providing more funding to grow the program.

The party estimates hiring a combined total of 200 additional police officers and mental health nurses will cost the City of Vancouver about $20 million annually. They claim it can be fully funded without a tax increase, a redeployment of existing policing and healthcare professional resources, or cuts to existing programs. Sim states the expansion of Car 87/88 would be the first policy move if he is elected as mayor with a City Council comprised of an ABC majority.

To combat the public safety and mental health crisis, on day one, an ABC majority on Council will requisition for the hiring of 100 new police officers and 100 new mental health nurses — an ABC-led Council will dramatically expand the highly successful Car 87/88 program 1/2 pic.twitter.com/ZRVsfYduZk

— Ken Sim (@KenSimCity) August 15, 2022

While critics of policing point to the desire for additional investment in non-policing resources, such as in healthcare and social workers, there have been immense challenges to scaling this model alone. Typically, for their personal safety reasons, healthcare and social workers will only attend to an incident in the Downtown Eastside if they are also accompanied by police. This is particularly the case for entering SROs, and supportive and social housing.

Sim and ABC’s promise for expanding Car 87/88 comes in the backdrop of the debate over the VPD’s funding, and greatly contrasts with Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s open confrontations with VPD leadership and the governing police board.

Early this year, the provincial government ruled that Vancouver City Council was in the wrong for previously rejecting the additional $5.7 million requested by the VPD for its 2021 budget. Under provincial direction, the City of Vancouver is required to incorporate the $5.7 million into the VPD’s budget at the earliest opportunity, most likely in 2023 at this point of budget planning.

The VPD previously stated that as a result of City Council’s funding decision, it was unable to hire 61 new recruits. They have also seen an attrition of officers to the new Surrey Police Services, which means the VPD needs to be highly competitive in its recruitment efforts to retain and replace officers leaving for other forces or retiring.

Recent statistics show violent crime is up in Vancouver, and there is significant underreporting of crime in the city. In the first quarter of 2022, there were nearly 19,000 non-emergency calls that went unanswered — equivalent to about 40% of all calls. The VPD have also had to respond to over 1,000 protests and acts of civil disobedience (e.g. environmental activists blocking traffic) over the past three years.

Moreover, resources of both the VPD and Vancouver Fire Rescue are stretched thin, with a growing proportion of the time and resources of the personnel of both City-funded departments deployed to handle calls relating to opioid overdoses and mental health issues.

To date, ABC has nominated seven individuals to run for 10 of the city councillor seats, including former VPD constable and spokesperson Brian Montague.

The civic election is scheduled for October 15, 2022.

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