Ms Fiona Wilson:

That is a great question. We were definitely noticing it ourselves. I am the president of the British Columbia Association of Chiefs of Police and, as an organisation, we were hearing this loud and clear from police leaders across the province. This was not just limited to Vancouver, and I can say that with confidence. Our police officers were noticing that there was increased congregation in front of businesses, for example. Business owners were complaining that their customers were afraid to come in because there would be people using drugs outside the doors of the businesses on the sidewalk. We were seeing both injection drug use and inhalation. With respect to inhalation, there were sometimes by-laws that we were able to utilise because we have smoking by-laws. If they were using within a certain distance of a doorway, for example, we have prohibitions against that with respect to smoking that we were able to utilise regardless of whether it was crack cocaine or a cigarette. For the most part, many of the complaints were around parks, playgrounds and areas in front of businesses on sidewalks, and bus shelters were another good example.

One of the things that happened with decriminalisation is another nuance that you do not contemplate until you get into it. Before drugs became decriminalised, people would historically have called 911 to say that a bunch of people are standing outside their business, and they are all using drugs and the person would like them to be moved along. That call would go onto our call board and our members would respond. They would generally go out and ask everybody to leave, and they would leave because they did not want trouble with the police, did not want to get arrested and did not want their drugs seized, and that would be the end of that.

People learned very quickly that if they did call 911 to report something like that, the third party service provider who answers our phones would say, “I am sorry, that is not a police matter”, because our police officers had no lawful authority to do anything about that kind of behaviour in the absence of any unlawful behaviour like causing a disturbance or breaking a smoking by-law. It was difficult to measure the complaints from the public because the public quickly learned there was no point in calling. From a research and analysis perspective, it was hard to determine the statistics because those calls to services, as one would expect, naturally go down as people learn there is nothing anyone can do about that kind of problematic circumstance of consumption, assuming that people were using what appeared to be under 2.5 g and they were not in a place that was an exception to the exemptions. That is another thing to be aware of. If you are not going to deal with the matter of public consumption, it gets difficult to measure the impact on communities because it is no longer a police matter, if that makes sense.