Patrolling big events like the Stanley Cup Final leaves police with an uncomfortable choice between spending taxpayer money efficiently and having enough uniforms on the street, Chief Jim Chu says.
After the release this week of an independent review into the Stanley Cup riot, Chu acknowledged that in hindsight, he wishes he had deployed more officers to the downtown core on the night of June 15. If he could have predicted the future, the chief says he would have asked for help from as far away as Edmonton and Winnipeg.
"If I had the luxury of millions of dollars of extra funding, I probably would deploy an extra 100 or 1,000 officers for every event, but pretty soon the taxpayer would be pretty fed up with that," he told CTV News.
"Earlier in the playoffs, we were criticized. People were saying, ‘Why are the cops standing around doing nothing? You're wasting my money.'"
The review from John Furlong and Doug Keefe, released Thursday, revealed that 446 officers were stationed downtown for Game 7 between the Vancouver Canucks and Boston Bruins. That number more than doubled to 928 by the end of the night as officers were called in from home and from other cities.
Chu defends the number of officers deployed, saying the department based that figure on its experiences during previous playoff games and the Olympics, and didn't predict that 155,000 people would be flooding into the core to watch the game.
"We didn't anticipate a riot. We didn't anticipate a crowd that large, that drunk, headed into our city," Chu said.
Once the crowd started getting out of control, knocking down security fences, starting fights and hurling bottles at the giant TV screens in the Georgia Street fan zone, he says it was difficult to respond instantly.
"It's difficult logistically to all of a sudden deploy officers. They're not just sitting on a shelf waiting to be deployed," he said.
"You've got officers that are perhaps dropping their kids off at school or waiting for the wife to get home"
And keeping police on standby doesn't come cheap: "If we put officers on standby, we have to pay them. It's a balance. Do we want 500 officers sitting around the office doing nothing?" Chu said.
One of the key messages the chief has taken away from the riot review is that B.C. needs a regional strategy for dealing with large public events. That includes planning to make sure that hordes of drunk people aren't smuggling booze into Vancouver from the suburbs.
"When the people of the region come into Vancouver, then the region should have a response to it," he said.
"Rather than just trying to get everybody when they get into Vancouver and take their liquor, you have to remember people are getting drunk in their own communities.... You intercept them perhaps to New Westminster, perhaps in Surrey and say, ‘You can't get on the SkyTrain system, you're too drunk,' or, ‘You're carrying liquor illegally.'"
Despite the widespread damage to property and the city's reputation done during the riot, Chu says that Vancouver is capable of hosting big public events for crowds that are predictably well-behaved: people like those whose attend the Pride Parade, race in the Sun Run or even watch the Celebration of Light.
But events that attract mostly young men are another matter entirely.
"I think if you're attracting a younger demographic that's prone to public space binge drinking, we have to look at that and say, ‘Do we really want to do that?'" Chu said.
