VPD officer blogs about working on DTES
Posted September 14, 2011 2:13 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – You can now read the day-to-day experiences of a Vancouver Police officer on the beat in the Downtown Eastside. Constable Steve Addison is a member of the VPD Beat Enforcement Team, a group of officers who patrol Canada’s poorest neighbourhood.
“It’s the place in the city where all the action is. It’s very busy, I like to be busy,” says Addison, leading the media on a tour of his beat around Main and Hastings Streets.
He stopped to chat with a man selling goods out of a shopping cart and checked in on a woman huddled under a blanket.
Addison wasn’t asked to write about his work and it’s not a public relations exercise for the force. “No, this was something that I came up with and I approached the department to see if there was an appetite for it and they said certainly.”
Addison admits the neighbourhood has a lot of challenges with hard drugs and mental illness, and plenty of people may disagree with him.
“A lot of people have different opinions on how to fix the problems down here and what the problems are,” he explains. “I fully expect that a lot of those people are going to be visiting the blog, reading the postings, commenting on what they think the solution is. Like I said, I don’t have the solution.”
The beat cop won’t be debating people online, and not everyone is impressed with the idea of the blog.
Local volunteer Dalannah Bowen objects to Addison’s term “action.”
“There are people on the police force that are not proactive about the changes that need to happen down here. They have their set mind,” she says. “When somebody who is mentally ill comes and has an episode where they are freaking out and [police] shoot them in the heart instead of the knees, I have a problem with that.”
Bowen goes on to say that she wants someone from the neighbourhood to be able to blog with Addison. “Let somebody from the Downtown Eastside community participate in that and have an ongoing dialogue about what’s going on.”
Bowen adds she will pitch the idea to Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu when she sits down for a meeting with him.
