A Vancouver Police study shows that sexual harassment rates are low at the department, according to Chief Adam Palmer, in what appears to be a response to a series of CTV News stories on the issue.
But while the chief confirmed the report exists, he wouldn’t say more because it was being presented at a private session of the Vancouver Police Board.
“We will be briefing the board in more detail, but I’ll tell you the actual numbers, we’ve done a full analysis, it’s very low, for sexual harassment in our department,” he said, adding that the analysis was done just in the last week.
The investigation continues into one of two officers who may have had inappropriate relationships with Constable Nicole Chan, who had mental health problems and committed suicide in January. The other officer was found to have committed misconduct.
Since then, seven current and former employees have told CTV News they’ve experienced or witnessed sexual harassment on the job.
Last month, Vancouver’s mayor said that he would be discussing the issue of sexual harassment at the VPD with his colleagues on the Police Board.
“I can assure you I will be reviewing the cases,” Kennedy Stewart said then, though he said he doubted there was a systemic problem at the department.
Today, the mayor would only say that he couldn’t talk about the measures that were happening at the private session of the police board.
“We can’t talk about the content of the agenda or anything that happens in there,” Stewart said Thursday. “As chair of the board we are constantly reviewing things like this. We have wide-ranging discussions on it.”
Chief Palmer said that Chan’s death has been very hard for his officers.
“It really rocked the organization. It deeply impacted the organization and was hard to deal with for sure,” he said.
But he said any problem at the VPD was no worse than at any workplace where men and women work together.
“There’s going to be sexual harassment in any business in this country," Palmer said. "That’s just human nature when you get men and women working together. The important thing is that you have proper education and training and policies in place to make sure that people know what the boundaries are and what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable."
“When something’s brought to your attention you take firm action against it and make sure there’s consequences,” he added.
