VANCOUVER—Six Vancouver police officers surround two men on a deserted downtown Vancouver side street on Tuesday afternoon. Tears well in one man’s eyes. He is released without charge but is obviously shaken.

He says the encounter has made him late for his check-in at a nearby shelter and he’s worried he will lose his spot — the only place he has to sleep that night. He won’t give his name to StarMetro because he is afraid police will target him further for speaking out.

Twenty-four hours earlier and 40 kilometres away in Surrey, a young man is forcibly ejected from a McDonald’s. He needed a place to charge his phone. The manager threatened to call the police. The man also won’t give his name because he fears police backlash.

A report released Wednesday by Pivot Legal Society says these kinds of negative interactions with police are all too common in B.C. The report is the result of two years of work spanning 10 communities under the province’s five regional health authorities. It encompasses multiple focus groups and surveys as well as interviews with 76 individuals and more than 100 service providers.

Far from discouraging problematic behaviour, the report says, police interactions with marginalized people are actually contributing to harmful practices and to the problems of homelessness and overdose-related death tearing families and communities apart.

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Findings of the report include:

the routine disruption of harm-reduction activities, including seizure or destruction of drug paraphernalia, unnecessary police presence near supervised consumption sites and unnecessary police attendance at emergency overdose response calls

over-policing of marginalized communities, including discrimination, harassment, detention without charge and use of force directed disproportionately at Indigenous people, people who use drugs and people experiencing homelessness

the routine confiscation of the personal property of people living in public spaces as “one element of an all-encompassing and oppressive network of policing that also includes bylaw officers and private security guards”

Rather than discouraging substance use, police confiscation of drug paraphernalia actually encourages riskier behaviour, the report says. Some of the report’s participants reported searching for used drug paraphernalia — such as needles — on the ground after having their clean supplies seized. This dramatically increases the risk of the spread of diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis C, the report says, and runs counter to “long-standing public-health efforts to reduce rates” of such diseases.

The report also found individuals tend to avoid supervised consumption sites when police station themselves nearby for fear of arrest. When arrests do occur, this throws people who use drugs into — or back into — a criminal-justice system that the study considers ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of addiction.

Individuals whose fear of arrest drives them to use on the street are beyond the help of the trained practitioners inside supervised consumption sites, who are able to provide medical intervention in case of an overdose or help prevent overdose to begin with, says the report.

The province’s overdose prevention sites saw 66,600 visits between December 2016 and March 2017, according to the study. During this same time period, there were 481 overdoses and zero fatalities.

However, the “largely peer-run” Overdose Prevention Society in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside reported 108,803 visits alone between Dec. 25, 2016 and Oct. 9, 2017. It reported 255 overdoses and zero fatalities during that time period.

Reflecting on the stories in the Pivot study, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association’s executive director Josh Paterson said it’s clear law-enforcement across the province police communities in a way that is in direct conflict with the health goals of harm reduction.

“There is both an over-policing on the one hand and under-protecting on the other hand, which doesn’t make intuitive sense,” he told StarMetro in an interview.

“Police interactions are making people’s lives more difficult. But when people need the police, particularly Indigenous people in rural and northern British Columbia … oftentimes the resources aren’t there to make that happen.”

In a statement, the Vancouver Police Department pointed to several long-standing policies it has embraced to align its enforcement activities more closely with the goals of harm reduction. Since 2006, the statement said, the VPD has actively encouraged people who use drugs to access the city’s harm-reduction sites and does not target individual drug users for arrest for personal possession of illicit drugs.

Since 2006, the VPD has had a “no response” policy for overdose calls, unless their presence has been explicitly requested by Emergency Health Services. All VPD officers are trained in naloxone use, and their department has established full-time community liaison positions “to help vulnerable individuals and communities, including a homelessness outreach constable and a sex liaison constable.”

Vancouver police have also worked at improving their relationship with members of Indigenous communities, the statement said, “including initiatives to connect specifically with Indigenous women and girls, work in partnership with community members and organizations, integrate police officers into Indigenous communities, understand and participate in traditions and customs and provide training for members on cultural competency.”

The B.C. RCMP did not respond to an email request for comment by deadline.

In his past six years on Surrey’s streets, 49-year-old Chris Vance says he’s experienced police harassment first-hand.

“There are some really bad ones,” Vance says. “They humiliate you. They degrade you. They make sure you know you’re a lowdown piece of shit.”

For the past few months, Vance has lived outdoors in a wooded area along a side street on the outskirts of Surrey. He moved to a different ravine recently, he said, because bylaw officers found his spot and he was worried they or the police would confiscate his possessions — another key problem identified in the Pivot report.

“They assume we’re all thieves,” he says.

Vance recalls an incident a few months ago in which a woman who was camping near him lost everything she owned when bylaw officers took down her camp.

She’d been homeless for six months, Vance said, and bylaw officers had given her only three days to find somewhere to move her belongings. When she failed to meet the deadline, they simply confiscated all of it.

“She was crying,” Vance said. “All her stuff was gone, even the urn with her dad’s ashes in it.”

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Another common practice is to ticket homeless people for not wearing bicycle helmets, Vance said. Many people in the Surrey area use bicycles as their main source of transportation. Ticketing them for not wearing helmets only adds additional fines they have to pay if and when they are able to find employment or housing.

“It’s not like we’re able to pay the tickets right now,” he said.

As frustrating as these situations are, Vance is quick to point out that not all officers are bad. It comes down to the individual, he says.

The RCMP officers who police the Newton area of Surrey are particularly helpful and kind, he says.

“I had this one woman cop stop me one morning when it was really cold,” Vance said. “She got out of her car and was really worried if I was OK. She asked if I wanted a coffee. I asked how I could repay her, and she said, ‘Just keep being a good person.’”

Sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver, Brian Collard agrees with Vance.

“I’ve had lots of good, lots of bad. It’s really both,” Collard said.

Collard has lived in Toronto, Surrey and Vancouver and says his experiences with police across those jurisdictions have been mixed.

“In my experience, police give you the respect you give them back. If you start getting mouthy, or start running away, that’s when your trouble starts, usually.”

Collard says while the majority of his interactions have been positive, when things do go badly its usually more than a simple inconvenience.

“I’ve gotten sh-t kickings in the alleys. I’ve been arrested for jaywalking. I’ve got scars on both my legs from a police dog,” he said.

Collard says he’s been kicked out of housing by landlords simply for having the police show up and ask to speak to him. He said police often don’t appear to realize that in certain situations their very presence can cause difficulties for vulnerable people.

Now in recovery, Collard said he spent years as “a heavy-duty user,” which he thinks likely contributed to how police treated him.

When he was using, he said, it was common for police to stop him and make him empty his pockets. If they found him with a crack pipe, for example, they’d smash it.

Darcie Bennett, Pivot’s director of strategy and one of the authors of the study, said it’s clear the targeted criminalization of individuals who are at the heart of a public-health emergency is making that emergency worse. But, she said, there are some administrators and agencies who understand the need for reform.

“I’m optimistic that there are people within government who see that the status quo is not working,” Bennett told StarMetro in an interview, adding change does need to begin happening immediately.

“There are a few very urgent first steps,” she said. “One is really for various provincial ministries to be talking to each other and making sure our policing practice and what’s happening within the ministries of health and mental health and addictions … are aligned.”

The Pivot report also identifies several steps that could be taken to reduce the impact of community policing on marginalized individuals. It points to the VPD’s “no response” policy as one strategy that should be adopted provincewide. It also calls for a provincial policy to de-prioritize the confiscation of personal belongings and harm-reduction supplies and a requirement to issue receipts for those items that are seized.

It also calls on the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General and the attorney general to set out a clear set of directives guiding policing in B.C. and to set up a legal aid fund to increase access to justice for people who believe they are the victims of police harassment.

The office of the attorney general was unable to provide a response by deadline, saying a response would be forthcoming at a later date.

The study is unequivocal about the urgency of making changes to how B.C. communities are policed.

“Abuse by police and the resulting feeling of powerlessness impacts everything from substance use, to access to health services, to decisions about whether to call for help during a crisis,” the study said.

“As a province, we must demand better from our police.”

Correction – Dec. 5, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version of this story misspelled Darcie Bennett's surname.

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