This post has been reviewed by the Vancouver Media Co-op editorial committee.

Women Occupy Vancouver Police Station to Demand an Investigation into Missing and Murdered Women

→Original Peoples

Three women were arrested yesterday evening for refusing to leave the police station in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The women were demanding to meet with police chief Jim Chu and demand a thorough and transparent investigation into the murder of Ashley Machisknic.

The women entered the police station around 6:30pm, just as a two hundred person strong vigil in Machisknic's memory began to file out of a narrow alley near Hastings and Main where they had gathered in a vigil. Those attending the vigil marched together to the police station, where they stayed until after 9pm.

The women who entered the police station refused to leave until Chu would meet with them.

"Calls to investigate the deaths of the women in this neighbourhood in a timely and thorought manner have been coming to the VPD for almost three decades now," reads a letter addressed to Chu written by Alice Kendall, a member of the Feburary 14th Memorial March Committee. "Earlier in 2010, Vancouver police Deputy Chief Doug Lepard made his infamous comment 'This can never happen again.' Clearly it is happening, and the VPD area again doing nothing," it says.

Machisknic was 22 years old when she was violently murdered behind the Regent Hotel on September 15.

Camera: Dawn Paley

Editing: Dawn Paley, Franklin López