Vancouver is Dying. The title of this appalling video evokes so much – social decay, grief for the loss of a vibrant city, and, of course, quite literally in the number of opioid deaths that Vancouver has been suffering since the Public Health Emergency was declared in 2016. From a certain perspective, it rings of Canada being “broken“, another pithy right-wing talking point that evokes the trendy, new conservatism cropping up around the world. Vancouver needs a rejuvenation; what was once great about this city has been lost, died even, and that greatness needs to be reclaimed. A call to arms for the nostalgic toward a never elucidated golden age. MVGA.

But as I said, Vancouver is literally dying. Toxic drug deaths have more than doubled from 994 when the emergency was declared in 2016 to 2,272 in 2022. There is a catastrophic need for change, and everyone is going to have an opinion on what that change ought to look like – whether a return to a foggy idea of a bygone age, or an attempt at something new. Some opinions will be based on historical trends, data, studies, and the needs of those most impacted as described by them, and others will be based on moral panic. Vancouver is Dying is firmly entrenched in the latter, and while that may seem unfair given its noble misnomer of being a “documentary”, I am dedicating several blogs to breaking this shit down, and I expect my biting sarcasm is only going to get worse.

Vancouver is Dying is a lot. It’s only 55 minutes long, and even watching on 1.5x speed, it took me a full day to finish because I had to keep stopping it out of anger and disbelief. I can’t do this response all in one go, and rather than make a failed attempt at cramming too much into one article, I’m going to break it down thematically to make sure I’ve vomited all my opinions about it onto the page (screen?), and my stomach can finally settle.

I’m beginning with its focus on crime. I see this as a good place to start both because the propaganda itself begins there, but also because its manipulation of facts is the most obvious in this case. Let me give you an example: Our Hero and creator of this nonsense, Aaron Gunn, meets with a “leading crime analyst” for the Vancouver Police Department. After telling him that there have been about about four stranger attacks a day in Vancouver in recent years, she then tells Gunn, and I quote, “Your likelihood of being a victim of a random assault is one in four if you are a Vancouver resident.” Let that sink in. Vancouver has a population of about 675, 000 people, and there is a 25% chance that we will be assaulted? I feel like the number of stranger attacks would be a lot higher than four per day if that was the case. That is an insane statistic. If there are four assaults a day, that doesn’t mean that if you go out of the house, there is a one in four chance you’re going to be assaulted. There’s a four in 675, 218 chance you’ll be assaulted, and that’s only if the assaults are truly mathematically random. That is significantly lower than one in four. Math! Maybe our “leading crime analyst” misspoke – Vancouver would truly be dying if our leading crime analyst for the VPD can’t coherently analyze statistics! To give her the benefit of the doubt, I don’t want to suggest that she is actively misleading people because maybe she’s not – I want to suggest that Gunn is actively misleading people because he left that quote in his show, and his only response is “wow.” No follow up questions, no clarity on what 168, 804 daily stranger attacks would actually mean for the city, just wow. And so I too must deliver a similar message: wow.

Crime is scary. Even without the absurd hyperbole, stranger attacks are some Texas Chainsaw Massacre shit. And we have to know how this fear is impacting the world around us, so Gunn cites a statistic that 44% of businesses are saying that crime and public safety are the top issue they’re dealing with. Of course, he doesn’t cite the top concern, which are permitting, licensing, and red tape issues at 50%. And I have to imagine the crimes businesses are thinking of aren’t actually stranger attacks because that is mostly irrelevant to their day to day. They care about things like graffiti, theft, and destruction of property. Businesses give a fuck about how they can make money, and crime is obviously going to be a threat to that, but only very specific types of crime. For a context that Gunn will never give you, the options available on this survey are: licensing/red tape, housing, crime, economic policy, and taxes. These options don’t seem like they would be entirely relevant to the subject Gunn wants to talk about, yet this is still the survey he cites. Gunn is trying to frame crime as this serious public concern, and uses something that doesn’t even list climate change as an option. He’s using something he knows is going to have an inflated number since it’s being asked in a very specific context, and it doesn’t even end up being the greatest concern among the milquetoast social problems listed. It’s kind of like saying that Napster is the greatest threat to civilization by citing Metallica. For comparison, across Canada around the time when this swill came out, the top unprompted concerns Canadians had were healthcare, inflation, and the environment. Crime was not listed.

The other thing to keep in mind is that concern over something does not necessarily translate into that thing being a real problem. I could be scared of ghosts, that doesn’t mean that I’m actually under any kind of real threat. Luckily, Gunn pulls out all of the statistics comparing today’s crime rate to that of… 2018 and 2019. And it’s higher, sure – I’m not going to contest his data on this one, because ultimately it’s irrelevant. Of course crime rate is higher compared to those years, and it’s fairly easy to guess why. What was the biggest difference between the years 2019 and 2020? And guess what Gunn never mentions throughout his entire polemic?

I am not going to dignify that with an actual answer, because the context of the last few years is so universally obvious that I can’t actually tell if its omission is more egregious than suggesting there is a 25% chance I’m going to be attacked by a rando each time I walk out my door. But that’s exactly the point. If you start talking about the context surrounding crime and why it might be happening, that’s going to challenge any maliciously idealistic solution you might think of.

Gunn wants there to be more police. It’s the solution for recidivism, stranger attacks, drugs, you name it, the police will solve it. When you see every problem as a nail, you’ll always go for the hammer. That’s what this paucity of context provides – justification for brutality. Gunn is quite specific: he wants the return of “consequences” for people’s behaviour. Police aren’t supposed to be “friends” with the public – or, I suppose, certain populations within the public – they’re supposed to control the population the only way they know how.

Gunn’s cartoon villain of a retired police officer gives the answer. Some time in the 1990s, things changed and cops had to be nice; they had to be friends even if the people they were policing didn’t want to be friends with them. This was apparently a bad thing. They are explicitly saying that police need to be crueler to the populations they are policing. Since citations are only a ‘sometimes food‘ in this parody of a documentary, Colonel Quaritch doesn’t actually provide the specific policy that changed. I looked online, and the best I could find from that time period that suggested a kinder approach to policing was an increase in the educational requirements for police, and a Chief Constable walking in a Pride parade. The additional kindness required seems to be implied, I guess. Maybe a policy exists out there that demands the pussification of the VPD, and I would read it and surely condemn it, but from what I found, it just looks like they just can’t be homophobic, dumb bruisers anymore. Truly a tragedy.

The police have had it rough. They can’t “stop and talk to people in the street” anymore, referring to carding, a practice that is notorious for its disproportionate impact on darker-skinned folks, and has no actual evidence to support that it does anything to reduce crime. They were also almost defunded, but then weren’t, and have had increasing budgets reliably for years. They are one of the most expensive police forces in Canada (per capita), but even suggesting alternative approaches to crime means that we’re blind to the danger of all those “nails” out there that need a hammerin’! This isn’t an exageration – Gunn is clear with the audience that the police never lost a cent, but that just the idea of Defund the Police demoralized the poor, fragile police department. Their feelings were hurt that other alternatives might be needed to address these social problems that we’re facing, and so their budget was saved. Stranger attacks still increased regardless of this increasing budget, but that’s for reasons that must not be named – but somehow is still maybe related to those dastardly impotent abolitionists?

So what constitutes a nail? It’s so damn important that we hammer those fuckers, it sure seems like it would be important to determine what we’re looking for. According to Gunn, the problem is the residents of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. When discussing the increase in stranger attacks, it’s not that more and more people are becoming desperate due to some unnamable global force, but that the DTES is “spreading.” Literally: “What was once contained to the Downtown Eastside, is now spreading into the rest of Vancouver.” It’s a phrase that’s thrown up more than once. It’s not that people in wealthy neighbourhoods could possibly commit violent acts, it’s that the DTES is a virus. They are coming for you. They run out to assault the ‘normal’ citizens, and then return to “hide in their tent cities” where they’re hiding weapons and drugs up and down the street; “You can only imagine what else is lingering nearby.” Spooky, scary shit!

This is what people mean when they talk about a thin blue line. There are real citizens who need to be kept safe, and those on the other side who only serve as a threat, who dirty the city, who don’t count as ‘real’ residents – as Gunn is clear when he literally puts “resident” in quotation marks when describing a homeless person. “These people” will never learn when they keep getting away with all their crimes – another quote. The smoke from this garbage fire is not subtle. When we talk about public safety, we have to be clear in whose safety we’re talking about, and safe from what threat. Safe from toxic drugs? Safe from police brutality? Safe from the elements? Fuck no! We need to be safe from them. They are the crime. They are what’s scary.

I don’t need to tell you the racial makeup of the residents of the DTES. You can guess. Much in the same way that Donald Trump spoke about “Chicago” to describe the threat that Black people pose to their whiter counterparts, so too the DTES becomes shorthand for the threat of BIPOC to the rest of Vancouver. These nails are not non-descript.

Gunn wants to be clear though. The police are not racist, nay, cannot be racist because racial diversity exists in the police board. Sure. But that’s not how systemic racism works, which Gunn would know if he ever actually looked into opposing viewpoints. Systemic racism is the idea of a thin blue line that needs violence to enforce – when you have a them, they will always, always, always disproportionately look different from the mainstream. You can avoid sounding racist by hiding it in racially-neutral language like Chicago, the Downtown Eastside, or criminals, but the clue really should have been describing any group, even one defined by city limits rather than skin colour, as a fucking disease. It doesn’t matter the tint of the person advocating for that because it’s the methodology of the entire system that’s the problem.

What happens if we look at context? What happens if we abandon our nail metaphor and look at other factors that might contribute to an increase in random, violent crime? One thing that Gunn never mentions is that police-involved deaths have risen 700% since 2012. Maybe that would be interesting to consider in the context of police allegedly being forced to be friends with the DTES residents.

Oh, and yeah, everyone’s supports got canned for two years. They weren’t even running Alcoholics Anonymous meetings! You couldn’t see your doctor; you couldn’t see your friends or family; you couldn’t even see your coworkers. Everyone’s lives shut down in an event that apparently has no impact on the increase in violent crime. Police can’t stop a disease, only human beings defined as a disease!

Maybe we should be focusing on rebuilding connections that were lost during that time? Or revolutionizing the way people get mental health supports, or adjusting the way we live to the point where mental health concerns are reduced proactively? Maybe if people got sick leave, or had secure employment, or a better safety net was in place, more people wouldn’t have succumbed to desperation and lashed out accordingly? Maybe those things could be addressed!

But Gunn doesn’t want context because he has an agenda. He wants more, violent police. He is explicit in this. I’d show you clips, but I don’t want to give him the traffic, so hopefully my quotes show how open he is about emboldening police in their brutality toward a particular demographic of people. He wants the police to be more violent toward drug users because, in his words, he cares about them. He wants to literally bully them into abstinence. Perhaps he wants the police to violently control other social ills as well, but what he explores next is drug use, so that’s where we’ll go too! Stay tuned while I go cry in the shower for a bit.

Part II