Justice committee  No. Policing is made up of a lot of parts, and the investigative part is another group of people. I was just relaying how difficult it has been to go from zero to a hundred in the use of technology in this kind of investigation. We sent an army of police officers down to Indianap

Justice committee  I'm not trying to bring a nexus into unlawful search and seizure or anything like that. It's just that the MO, the method of operation, for tactics by disrupters is usually they show up and store a backpack with all their gear in the bushes somewhere, or they have a very thin bac

Justice committee  The one thing that's involved in policing is discretion, and when you screen police officers, when you train police officers in the fundamentals of law enforcement in our society, you can't get away from discretion. We're a professionally policed country. With other crimes, suc

Justice committee  Absolutely. We had many people who were trying to get out of the downtown core. That was part of what made it difficult for policing the riot or bringing it in control quicker, although it was fairly quickly controlled. You have people trying to get out, who don't want to be invo

Justice committee  Again, I can say that the courts.... I don't have the wherewithal to have all the knowledge on how the courts have applied it and how they've sanctioned people who have been in violation of that. What I can tell you is that that particular law is fine when the person gets to cou

Justice committee  The number of charges that we've recommended is 592 against 200 rioters. The number that have been approved by the crown, and they're working their way through these—they've approved 226 charges against 85 persons. So it's sort of a processing line. We're continuing to recommend

Justice committee  I'm not on the investigative part of the riot investigation team, but the charges include everything from mischief, break and enter, commercial break and enter, level two, level three assaults, theft from auto, theft of auto, and the participating in a riot charge.

Justice committee  I'm not a legal expert, by any means, but I can tell you the law with the last one you mentioned, subsection 351(2). That is applied by police officers on...if somebody is robbing a bank—they go in and rob a bank with a balaclava on, they run out of the bank, and you catch them—i

Justice committee  Let's look at the most recent example of the Vancouver riot. We have a huge crowd there, 100,000 or 150,000. Some people we impeded before the riot began, but many people we didn't, because the crowds were so large. What has this cost our department and the local citizenry, inclu

Justice committee  Yes, we had 40 to 45 reported assaults, and half of them were on police officers. There are many stories about the riots. Some people called the police after they were assaulted; some didn't. I'm just telling you the ones that were reported. A mob of 15 rioters attacked one perso

Justice committee  Some employees had to lock themselves in back rooms or security rooms, and some of them remain traumatized to this day. We had a famous store that blends coffee near the heart of the riot, and this poor victim had to lock herself in while she heard a mob outside attacking and des

Justice committee  I'm speaking from my experience as a public order commander. When you have a crowd on the ground and you're trying to ensure the safety of the crowd, and the point you're trying to make is respected and you amend your tactics according to the crowd, which is a peaceful crowd, you

Justice committee  Thank you. I'll speak from the perspective of being an on-the-ground public order commander. I understand that there are avenues in the Criminal Code that touch on wearing a disguise while committing an indictable offence. I'm not a legal expert, but I know that the threshold

Justice committee  Suppose people show up with backpacks—and we see this all the time—with gas masks, handkerchiefs, and different items. They are people who are known to us. They infiltrate a crowd and hide in it. As soon as they are masking up, or if we search their backpacks, we can have a much

Justice committee  Thank you, and good morning. I am very pleased to be provided the opportunity to speak with you today about my experiences as a public order commander for the Vancouver Police Department. I have been a law enforcement officer for 22 years. I have been a public order commander fo