The state of emergency has be renewed in the DTES. Following the 'homeless emergancy', the 'mental health crisis' has just been declared. The mayor, speaking at a police press conference, flanked by the police chief, compared this 'crisis' with the previous HIV/AIDS & O.D. epidemic and calls for a similar multi-services response to this emergency. Probably unknown to the mayor and his minions, the cops and health services have been referring to the contemporary times as 'second-generation emergancy', that is, following the 'flood of services into the DTES' (Vancouver Coastal Health). In this deluge, all that remains is for the strategic deployment of these services by the bio-medical policing apparatus. This most recent state of emergency can be read as such an operation.

 

The 'demands' made by the police in their new report, which the chief and mayor released on Friday, calls for the money to implement:

1. Add 300 long-term and secure mental health treatment beds.
2. More staffing at BC Housing sites to support tenants with psychiatric issues and a reduced proportion of this type of tenant.
3. More significant support through Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams for psychiatric patients living in the community, including those residing in market housing.
4. An enhanced form of urgent care (crisis centre) that can ensure consistent and expert care of individuals in crisis situations, located at a Vancouver hospital.
5. The creation of joint VPD-VCH Assertive Outreach Teams for mentally ill persons who do not yet qualify for ACT teams.

 

How these 5 demands extend the on-going operations taking place now are by 1) Creating a mental asylum to warehouse folks for long-terms. 2) More staff at the 40 hotels purchased by the state and converted into care facilities (under the guise of 'social housing'), as well as the 13 new care facilities that go on-line this year, is critically needed to bolster security and control in these buildings. 3) Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams are nurses that work with the police within the networked care facilities. More than 70% of tenants are subjected to this style of health provision and many are forced to take medication on-site and all tenant/patients information is shared. The police are looking for 'significant support' to strengthen and extend their Project Link, which is the biopolitical coalition with Coastal Health Authority. 4) The cops have been demanding a 'care centre' for years, so as to dump bodies; much in the way as a 'drunk tank'. 5)  Assertive Outreach Teams will be the seekers of those few remaining 'homeless' persons who have so far evaded the housing apparatus. This year almost 3,000 folks have been apprehended by cops under the Mental Health Act. This mass internment of people circulate threw the hospital, emergency shelter and care facility; the Mental Health Act, with the recent addition of community court, ensure that this cycle is not broken.

 

The creation of the camps in the DTES, which are the spaces where the state of emergency has become the norm, and life is stripped bare and exposed to control, necessitates consistent biopolitical upkeep. More then direct police intervention, it is the campaigns for social justice and human rights which creates forms of bare life. By seizing these short-sighted campaigns and creating from them police operations, the bio-medical police apparatus becomes benevolent and the ghetto becomes a 'social justice zone'.

 

The cops press release and their report can be read here: 

http://mediareleases.vpd.ca/2013/09/13/mayor-chief-constable-call-for-urgent-investments-to-help-those-with-severe-mental-illness/