VANCOUVER – An independent review into how Vancouver Canucks fans were able to run amok, trashing and looting stores, upending cars and setting fires, has been considering whether a regional force would have stopped the melee sooner.
John Furlong, the former head of Vancouver’s Olympic committee, and Douglas Keefe, a former Nova Scotia deputy attorney general, will release their report on the riot Thursday.
Among the submissions they heard were some advocating the regional force, said Rob Gordon, director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser and one of those who urged Furlong and Keefe in that direction.
“I don’t think it’s a question of more police, it’s a question of how police are organized and deployed,” Gordon said in an interview Wednesday.
Gordon, along with Liberal MLA Kash Heed and former Vancouver Police chief Bob Stewart, gave Furlong and Keefe their input on the riot along with recommendations that a panel be set up to consider merging police forces around Vancouver in at attempt to prevent similar catastrophic outcomes.
The same thing should be done in the Victoria area, Gordon added.
Currently, the cities around Vancouver are policed by a conglomeration of municipal forces in Vancouver and some suburbs and the RCMP, which has jurisdiction in other suburbs. There’s also a transit police force.
Heed, the former solicitor general for B.C. and former police chief for West Vancouver, said he urged Furlong and Keefe to recommend that the structure of policing in the province be reviewed.
Heed has long favoured some form of unified police force for the province.
Based on the experiences of other jurisdictions with unified forces, the results of the riot could have been different if the police forces out that night were united and more organized, he said.
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“I think it is something we definitely have to look at, given the response to this particular incident.”
Heed said past police issues such as the gang problem and the missing women’s investigation that led to the conviction of Robert Pickton may have been better served by a metropolitan force.
“There is the possibility that the structure of policing in British Columbia is more of a hindrance than helpful in these particular circumstances.”
Neither Heed nor Gordon wanted to prejudge what would be in the riot report.
Heed was on the Vancouver force and was part of the crowd control unit during the 1994 riot.
“We thought we learned a lot from 1994, but it doesn’t appear some of that knowledge was applied from those circumstances,” he said. “I’m hoping we’re able to put in sound policies, sound structures, sound process, so we don’t have to go through this again.”
The independent review announced by the B.C. government, the city and Vancouver Police asked Furlong and Keefe to investigate what was learned from the 1994 Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver, the availability of liquor and the police and city framework for celebrations in public spaces, something “for which Vancouver is world-renowned.”
Gordon said the riot clearly caught police off guard.
On June 15, Gordon said police did the right thing by going from a so-called soft-hat to a hard-hat approach to policing the crowd when things turned violent.
But there was a serious flaw, he said.
When officers pulled out to change into helmets and grab shields, the crowd took over and police lost control, Gordon said.
“It’s quite unbelievable that this would have happened, but it did,” he said.
“The VPD, the city nearly lost it there. They were lucky, in my view, that it didn’t escalate,” Gordon said. “I think that that was due to the crowd itself … didn’t grasp the fact that they were really running the streets there for a while.”
Just as the Canucks lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup series against the Boston Bruins, a crowd of jersey-clad rioters turned over a vehicle in a celebration zone and set it alight.
Three hours later, more than 60 stores had been damaged or looted, numerous cars were set on fire, several people were injured and the damage total reach many millions.
Given the short time line, Gordon said he doesn’t expect Furlong and Keefe to have an in-depth analysis of what went wrong, but he does expect some key points to be made.
“I think they (civic and police officials) savagely underestimated the crowd and, as I say, I think they were probably intoxicated by the Olympic success,” he said, referring to the massive crowds that converged peacefully on the downtown core during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.
If the activity on a new Vancouver Police Department website is any indication, the events of the riot are still on the minds of Metro Vancouver residents.
The site dedicated to identifying suspected rioters had almost 90,000 hits less than 24 hours after the website went on line.
Vancouver Canuck forward Daniel Sedin, who just returned to Vancouver from Sweden, said Wednesday it’s not a surprise that the riot has remained at the top of the news.
“It was a sad thing,” said Sedin.
“Sad things usually stick around. I’m not surprised at all. Hopefully they can find every guy that was involved. We will see what happens.”
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