2010 & CRIMINALIZATION OF THE POOR

“The desire to show off a city & make it an attractive tourist destination is often accompanied by a process of sanitation- clean-ups of public areas facilitated by criminalization of homelessness & increases in police powers… to make it more attractive for the local, national and international elites.”
(Fair Play for Housing Rights, p. 22)

“Although the IOC rule demanded a protest-free zone, it did not specifically require the street sweeps that by the late 1980s had become a standard feature of most hallmark events. On these occasions, homeless people, sex trade workers, and beggars were harassed by police, evicted from downtown neighborhoods, and often arrested. Such sweeps have been documented during all Summer Olympics since 1984—Los Angeles, Seoul, Barcelona, and Atlanta…”
(Inside the Olympic Industry, pp. 108-109)

Criminalization refers to the portrayal of social groups, or movements, as primarily criminal matters with no political ideals or motivations. This involves public statements, smear campaigns, passing of special laws, as well as the actual arrest, charge, & imprisonment of group members. Criminalising a group therefore involves various state and corporate institutions, including government, courts, police, jails, and media.
In the context of Olympic Games and other mega-events, criminalization is a means by which the poor and other undesirable elements can be controlled and forced out of areas, the goal of which is to create a sanitary environment for wealthy tourists and businessmen, primarily in downtown areas. In situations where there may be resistance to gentrification or redevelopment, criminalization also works to undermine social movements & marginalize them.
Criminalization creates the context for repression, and yet is an essential part of the process at the same time. Once a group is portrayed as mostly criminal, the pretext is thereby created for some form of police action (i.e., investigation, surveillance, harassment, arrest, charge, etc.).

Sydney 2000: Key Points

During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, measures to criminalize & displace the poor & homeless included:
• As early as 1997, there were reports of Sydney business owners requesting police to remove vagrants from their areas.
• In newly gentrified areas, residents hired private security guards.
• A ‘Street furniture program’ similar to Atlanta 1996, which included refitting park benches and transit shelter seating to prevent people from laying down.
• Installing bright lights in areas used for shelter by the homeless, as well as the placement of Olympic concert sites in areas where the homeless gathered.
• Privatization of urban public space in the late ‘90s limited access to public toilets, along with the installation of blue lighting; both of these measures were designed to deter the homeless & drug users.
• Anti-graffiti campaigns, including the set up of a special hotline people could phone to report on graffiti & vandals.
• New legislation that expanded police powers to stop & search individuals, as well as the set up of special zones in which people could be removed or arrested. This legislation included the Police & Public Safety Act, Protection & Parental Responsibility Act, and the Homebush Bay Operations Regulation (1999) (see 2010 Police State, Police Repression Case Study: Sydney 2000). The primary targets for this were the homeless, youth, sex trade workers, and Aboriginals.

Vancouver and 2010

Following the Sydney and Atlanta models, BC passed new legislation targeting the poor, while business associations and city council in Vancouver hired a former cop (an expert on crowd control), & a former Attorney General, to impose law and order in the downtown area.

Safe Streets Act
BC passed the Safe Streets Act in 2004 to prohibit panhandling “in an aggressive manner,” such as obstructing the path of a person, using abusive language, or following behind, alongside or ahead of a person being solicited for spare change. The act included persons in motor vehicles being solicited, such as by ‘squeegee cleaners’ who wait at traffic lights to ‘clean’ driver’s windows. Police are authorized to arrest persons violating the act without warrant.
Although a provincial act, the legislation is directed primarily at downtown areas of cities, and in particular Vancouver. A coalition of business groups (downtown hotels, banks and corporations), including the Vancouver Downtown Business Improvement Association and the Vancouver Board of Trade, were the main promoters of the Safe Street Act (SSA). The act has been severely criticized by civil liberties and anti-poverty groups.

Dave Jones- Capitalist’s Cop
A main contributor to the SSA was Dave Jones, who now serves as Security Consultant & head of crime prevention for the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA). Under Jones, the DVBIA hired a private security force from Genesis Security, the ‘Downtown Ambassadors’, to patrol city streets. The DVBIA pays $680,000 a year to maintain it. Jones’ was also the main promoter of removing garbage dumpsters from downtown alleys, saying they are a “source of criminal activity.”
Jones is a former Inspector with the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), having retired in 2004. In 1997, he was commander of the downtown district. He is a well-known advisor on crowd control methods, and was present at several large protests, including Genoa & Quebec City. In 1998, he was field commander responsible for deploying the VPD Crowd Control Unit during the ‘Riot at the Hyatt’, when then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien was attending a Liberal Party fundraising dinner. The CCU assault on protesters caused several serious injuries from baton strikes.
Jones was also commander of district 1 when the Woodward’s Squat was underway (2002), a long siege-like process that ended with a platoon of CCU cops moving in to assault & arrest scores of protester-squatters. The squat was, in some ways, the opening round of the fight for social housing in the Downtown Eastside, which would inevitably transition to anti-Olympics resistance.
In January 2008, the Vancouver Police Union launched a legal challenge against the City of Vancouver for its plan to spend nearly $1 million for private security guards from Genesis as part of the ‘Ambassador’ program. In 2007, the VPD had requested funding for 65 new cops, but city council approved hiring only 17. The police union claims the money spent on private security should be used to hire new police officers.

Project Civil City
In 2006, Vancouver City Hall launched ‘Project Civil City’, a broad-ranging initiative focusing on homelessness, panhandling, policing and public disorder. According to Mayor Sam Sullivan, it seeks to reduce by 50 % homelessness, aggressive panhandling, open drug use, and excessive drinking & fighting in the downtown area (all by 2010). Along with a proposal to hire more by-law officers & prosecutors, there are also recommendations to increase CCTV video surveillance of streets and the city’s anti-graffiti campaign.
To accomplish these tasks, the city allocated some $1 million from the 2007 Olympic Legacy Fund budget to expand policing and by-law enforcement, and $300,000 to directly fund Project Civil City. The corporate media has assisted the government in this process by running sensationalist stories on street crime, aggressive panhandlers, and drunken partyers in the downtown area.
Although Sullivan claims Civil City has nothing to do with the Olympics, previous statements have contradicted this:
“There is no question that we must act swiftly & decisively to solve the public disorder problems that affect our city. I believe we have a tremendous opportunity to use the upcoming 2010 Olympic & Paralympic Games as a catalyst to do just that.”
(Mayor Sam Sullivan, www.mayorsamsullivan.ca/project-civil-city-letter.html)

Project Civil City includes as advisors provincial and federal ministers such as federal Public Safety minister Stockwell Day, David Emerson (federal minister responsible for the Olympics), and BC Attorney-General Wally Oppal.

Geoff Plante- Law & Order ‘Czar’
If the focus on ‘law and order’ wasn’t clear enough, in May 2007, former BC Attorney-General Geoffe Plante was appointed as Vancouver’s Civil City Commissioner. Plante was Attorney-General from 2001-2005, when he was also the minister responsible for Treaty Negotiations. He was formerly part of the government defense team that fought against the Delgamuukw title case. As a member of the opposition, he fought against the Nisga’a treaty. As minister for treaty negotiations, he led the controversial Treaty Referendum in 2002. He also eliminated the BC Human Rights Commission, once part of the Attorney-General’s office.
Plante is also a board member of West Pac LNG, an Alberta-based energy corporation seeking to build a $2 billion liquefied natural gas plant on Texada Island (off of Vancouver Island). Although he had no previous experience with the DTES, Plante has been given the mandate to impose a ‘law & order’ solution on a social crisis arising from homelessness, addiction, and mental health problems.
In November 2007, Plante’s position as Civil City commissioner came under attack by city councilors, who criticized the $300,000 paid for his post as well as his lack of progress. In his first progress report issued in the Fall of 2007, Plante stated there was no way to measure the amount of aggressive panhandling or open drug use, and therefore no way to quantify a 50 per cent reduction in these activities.
In response to both the Safe Streets Act and Civil City, community groups have held forums, protests, and direct actions. In the summer of 2007, members of the APC began holding film nights in East Vancouver parks, violating curfew laws (under the banner ‘Parks are for People Not Pigs!’). This included over-night occupations of parks.

Other Measures

Urban Control & Architecture
Other initiatives launched by Vancouver City Council and the Downtown Business Improvement Association have been to construct new benches with arm rests preventing persons from laying down, new trash bins on city streets that make it more difficult to retrieve recyclables from, as well as the removal of all garbage dumpsters from downtown alleys (a major source of income for many poor, who remove recyclables and items for re-sale).

Fly-Back of Prisoners
In Canada, many lesser offenses are classified as non-returnable warrants, meaning they aren’t worth transporting prisoners to stand trial if they’re stopped in another province by police. In the Fall of 2007, new Vancouver Police chief Jim Chu announced a plan to fly suspects wanted on criminal charges in other provinces back to stand trial. Chu stated that local businesses were willing to ‘donate’ their air miles in order to help make it happen.
In January 2008, Vancouver Police began a ‘pilot project’, arresting a 46-year old man wanted in Ontario on drug charges, threatening bodily harm, and breaking his probation. According to police, they had had 69 dealings with him since he moved to Vancouver in 2002, but Ontario police refused to pay to fly him back. When they learned he would be transported at no cost to them, Ontario cops agreed.
Darcy Rezac of the Vancouver Board of Trade claims they had raised 1,025,000 flyer points just from the board of directors. Police estimated the cost of escorting a prisoner back to Toronto as being $2,500. Solicitor-General John Les stated that his ministry will pay the cost of the sheriff or constable who accompanies the suspect. Police claimed there are an “estimated 2,500 people wanted in other provinces on criminal charges and causing all kinds of trouble in Vancouver…” (“Cops target 2,500 not wanted here,” The Province, January 18, 2008).
Days later, the Anti-Poverty Committee announced their intent to gather frequent-flyer points to help those deported under this initiative travel back to Vancouver, claiming it is nothing more than a plan to remove homeless & destitute persons from the Downtown Eastside in preparation for 2010 (see “Poverty Committee collects air miles,” Metro Vancouver, January 24, 2007).

Corporate Media Propaganda
Along with these measures to impose control and carry out ‘social cleansing’ of the downtown area has been the efforts of corporate media to generate support for such policies. This includes sensational stories about the homeless & their association with crime, debauchery, drugs, and general depravity (often accompanied by graphic photos).
In August 2007, for example, an alleged homeless person was arrested and charged with the violent robbery of a 79-year old man inside a church lobby in downtown Vancouver (the victim was shoved to the ground). The attack was captured on security video cameras, and was broadcast widely by media, who adapted the police’s description of him as a self-confessed ‘professional panhandler.’

Criminalization of Resistance
Another aspect of criminalization is the efforts by police to undermine social movements by constantly portraying them as common criminals, without any political ideas or motivations. Although this relies on corporate media to publicize, it also involves actual arrests & charges as proof of criminal activity in itself.
While this is not a new trick, it has been most recently applied to the Anti-Poverty Committee (APC) in Vancouver, which has experienced almost 50 arrests of its members from Fall 2006 - Fall 2007. Again, corporate media collaborate in this by reporting police smear & disinformation campaigns as fact, and by relying on such sensational lies to sell more papers, or gain more viewers. In regards to anti-Olympics protesters, this has included labeling them as ‘hooligans’, violent thugs, etc. After the Feb. 12, 2007 Countdown Clock protest, police began using an old favourite, saying “these people aren’t protesters, they’re criminals!” just in case the public didn’t get the message.
In January 2007, a heavily-censored version of a Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) annual report obtained by journalists highlighted the agencies surveillance of anti-Olympic protest groups and concerns that anti-Olympic protests in 2010 could be ‘violent’ (see “CSIS monitoring risk of violence at Olympics,” by Jim Bronskill, Globe & Mail, January 21, 2008).

New Delhi, 2010 Commonwealth Games

In New Delhi, capital of India and site of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, “Beggars in the Indian capital will be photographed & fingerprinted under a plan to clear them from the city’s main streets ahead of he Commonwealth Games in 2010…
“Officials in the sprawling city of 14 million hope the planned data base will make it easier to convict beggars and discourage them from returning to the streets, the PTI news agency said.”
According to an unnamed official in the Social Welfare Department, “Our aim is to keep track of their records so that the needy can be rehabilitated while [the] habitual can be convicted.”
(“Delhi beggars not welcome at Games,” Vancouver Sun, January 31, 2008)