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Pivot Legal Society has sent a letter to Chief Constable Adam Palmer of the Vancouver Police Department and Mayor Kennedy Stewart to demand reduced police enforcement in the DTES during the coronavirus state of emergency.

The nonprofit human-rights organization claimed in the letter that certain types of enforcement are endangering residents' "health, livelihood, and security amid simultaneous public health emergencies".

The emergencies referenced include the opioid crisis, the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, and mental-health crises apart from the coronavirus crisis.

Travis Lupick

The letter was also addressed to VPD staff sergeant Richard Rabinovitch of the beat enforcement team, who has worked with Pivot in the past regarding complaints from the agency regarding the training of officers assigned to patrol the DTES.

In an accompanying release, Pivot’s criminalization and policing campaigner, Meenakshi Mannoe, said about calls for increased policing in the DTES during the public-health emergency.

“These calls for enforcement are gravely concerning. In other crises of health and inequality such as the drug poisoning crisis, the mental health crisis, or the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we have witnessed how policing and criminalization directly undermine health and harm reduction initiatives. Police should play no role in responding to public health emergencies, and we call on the VPD to immediately de-prioritize a number of their current strategies, so that folks can at least navigate their everyday survival without fear of police enforcement and interference.”

According to the release, actions requested for the types of policing that come under the banner of Pivot's demand include: minimizing the policing of "informal economies"; ceasing the overpolicing of homeless residents; halting the overpolicing of people who use drugs; and "minimizing contact with the criminal justice system".

Pivot also requested that the VPD halt its "chronic practices of displacing unhoused and precariously sheltered people, and surveilling and displacing sex workers at cost to their safety and livelihood".

Staff lawyer Caitlin Shane wrote in the release:

“Vancouver-based research shows that VPD practices routinely jeopardize access to health and harm reduction services. Continued police disruption of these activities amid overlapping public health emergencies is not only Constitutionally suspect, but directly at odds with the messaging of nearly every level of government to ensure harm reduction access during COVID-19.”

To read the full multipage letter, go here.