VANCOUVER—The heavy vehicles and rifle-toting police officers stationed at either end of Sunday’s Italian Day festival on Commercial Dr. are the “new normal” for large events, according to law-enforcement and criminology experts.

Joel Johnston, former use-of-force co-ordinator for the Vancouver Police Department and a member of the Crowd Control Unit, said the presence of police and mobile barricades is a necessary response to modern threats.

“We have seen deadly vehicle attacks across the globe,” Johnston said. “Anywhere there are gatherings of large crowds … needs to be secured as best as it can be. It is a foreseeable risk that can be mitigated.”

Vancouver Police Sgt. Jason Robillard told StarMetro in an email that the VPD does not release information regarding its tactics or operations to avoid “potentially unsafe” situations. He added the VPD “is responsible for preparing for more than 1,000 events in the City of Vancouver annually,” each of which requires an individual threat assessment and complementary response.

Over the past two years, Robillard said, the VPD has added extra resources “including equipping some officers with carbine rifles and using heavy vehicle barriers at events with large crowds, in response to world events.”

During an April press conference, Robillard told reporters these barriers are now a standard part of VPD planning and operations during large events like Canada Day and the Festival of Lights.

The Italian Day on the Drive festival brings hundreds of thousands of participants to a single, 1.4-kilometre stretch of road. Johnston said police departments are obligated to take preventative action to secure such events, since failing to do so would be a failure to observe basic standards of care for public safety.

“The vehicle has been identified by terrorist groups as the current favoured form of weapon,” he said. “(It’s) a weapon of opportunity, because they are accessible to virtually anybody and capable of causing mass casualties with minimal training. All it requires is a vehicle and a person willing to aim it at a target.”

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Canadians should not imagine terrorist attacks to be beyond the realm of possibility, said Bryan Kinney, associate director of undergraduate programs at the Simon Fraser University School of Criminology.

“It’s really dangerous to assume that we’re not going to be hassled in any way because we’re Canada, and we’re nice, we’re polite,” Kinney told StarMetro.

Vehicle attacks are not unknown to Canadians. A September 2017 truck attack in Edmonton injured a police officer and four civilians, while April’s van attack on Yonge St. in Toronto left 10 dead and more than a dozen injured.

“I’m glad the police are executing a plan,” Kinney said. “I’m glad they’re … trying to anticipate these things.”

Kinney acknowledged the sight of officers armed with tactical patrol rifles at family events would likely be “a real shock” for Vancouverites accustomed to a largely invisible security apparatus.

But he likewise recognized the police’s public-safety mandate would inevitably clash with the perception of basic freedoms held by many civilians.

“There’s a tension between safety and the appearance of a police state,” he said, adding conspicuous policing strategies inevitably give rise to conversations about the “slippery slope” from safety into militarization.

“This is a really hard row to hoe,” he said.

Brent Toderian, founder of Toderian UrbanWorks and former Vancouver planning chief, noted that Vancouver’s heavy vehicle barriers are temporary, while many international cities install more permanent barriers to control crowds and traffic.

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“I’m less worried about those than I am about the kinds of interventions that can last for seasons or months or years but can still be called temporary,” he said.

Toderian said many Canadians who travel abroad will have seen heavily armed officers elsewhere — but seeing automatic rifles at home is jarring nevertheless.

“It’s still off-putting to see those kinds of weapons,” he said, adding it is the culture and attitude of a police force that matters far more than the weapons its officers carry.

“On the other hand,” Toderian said, “unlike other countries, at least we can be reasonably sure (those weapons) are only in the hands of the police.”

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