Woman sues over VPD surveillance trailer parked near her apartment
A Chinatown resident took the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Police Department to court over a surveillance truck parked near her apartment.
Karina Papenbrock-Ryan alleged the VPD violated her privacy and charter rights when it left its surveillance trailer on East Pender Street four years ago.
The force calls the machine its Public Safety Trailer. It consists of cameras and other equipment mounted on wheels. Police placed it outside the Chinese Cultural Centre in April 2020 in response to racist graffiti referencing COVID-19, the holocaust, and threatening violence against Asian people.
The trailer was about one and a half blocks from Papenbrock-Ryan’s condominium. She estimated she walked through its field of view about 10 times without knowing what it was. When she saw a social media post explaining that it had cameras, she decided to modify her route so she wouldn’t walk past it anymore.
“Ms. Papenbrock-Ryan describes this action as a test case dealing with the rights of the public to be free from mass surveillance by means of video cameras deployed in a public place or, put differently, general video surveillance without a specific investigative purpose,” judge Bruce Elwood wrote in his December 16 decision.
Elwood dismissed Papenbrock-Elwood’s action but thanked her for bringing it forward.
The case focused on whether her privacy was breached. Elwood explained there are already laws governing continually recorded police surveillance of public spaces, facial recognition technology, collection of personal information by the VPD, targeted surveillance during a criminal investigation, and the admissibility of video evidence during a criminal trial.
The surveillance trailer records its video locally on a hard drive that’s wiped clean every four days unless an officer tries to access it. Though the judge accepted that Papenbrock-Elwood would have walked through its field of view, there’s nothing to suggest that a VPD officer accessed, reviewed, or distributed any images of her.
Given the totality of circumstances, the judge didn’t think her privacy was violated.
“At most, the footage of Ms. Papenbrock-Ryan would have disclosed her gender, her general appearance, her direction of travel, her mode of travel, and the date and time when she passed by,” the judge wrote. “It would not have revealed where she lives, where she works, where she was going, her religious or political beliefs, with whom she associates or any other biographical information about her.”
Pepenbrock-Elwood’s privacy concerns also had to be balanced against community concerns following the hateful graffiti.
“Provided it was working at the time, the [trailer] may have recorded a criminal act in progress, an image of a suspect, their direction and mode of travel, etc.” the judge wrote. “However, its primary purposes were to serve as a physical and psychological deterrent, and to reassure the community.”
The judge looked at screenshots from the trailer and estimated its field of view at about 40 square metres. Its cameras were aimed at the Chinese Cultural Centre.
The surveillance trailer ended up being removed in June 2020. It suffered technical difficulties that led to it not recording for several days. During that time, the trailer itself was tagged with graffiti.