VPD takes stand at Missing Women Inquiry
Posted November 7, 2011 11:28 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The Missing Women Inquiry has heard from professors, doctors and even sex trade workers, but not from police. But that all changed today.
Doug LePard, deputy chief of the Vancouver Police Department, took to the stand to answer questions like: why did it take so long to catch Robert Pickton?
LePard told the inquiry he understands the challenges of the Downtown Eastside with drugs, mental illness and surviving the sex trade, but he says homelessness was not as common in the 1980s. “Of all the other concerns you’ve mentioned, perhaps make these people even more in need of police protection than you might find in an affable area of our city.”
Some witnesses have said they reported attacks to the Vancouver Police Department but nothing was ever done. LePard says when police realized women were vanishing, they added more investigators to handle the caseload in 1998.
He apologized on behalf of the VPD’s failure to catch Pickton, but the force’s lawyers have told the inquiry its officers did the best they could with the information they had at the time.
Ann Livingston with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users has spoken of a police culture that was dismissive of the community’s concerns.
“All through the 1990s women were going missing and we were really frustrated trying to report their missingness [sic] and they would simply not take a missing report. There’s nothing as dismissive as that.”
“You could almost not even blame the police officers for not looking, if the clerk wouldn’t take the report, it wouldn’t open a file, therefore who could look for someone when there’s no file.”
