Athletes Village Tent Village: What the VPD wrote
BLOG POST posted on February 6, 2012 by infil00p
Today, I received four things in the mail. Three of those things were letters from CSIS indicating that they did get my cheques and that I will one day get a response from them of some sort. The fourth was a CD from the Vancouver Police Department with the information from the Olympic Tent Village protest. This includes a series of General Occurrence reports filed by the VPD, as well as the Operations Plan for the protest, which was done a month ahead of time.
It appears that in the introduction, the VPD is using "Open Source reporting", which as we know is fancy police talk to "We looked it up on the Internet", and it mentions the group VAN-ACT. Unfortunately, the Threat Assessment appears to be brief, but we will never know what it says, because the VPD redacted it under FIPPA because it may be harmful to the VPD. I don't know what the success rate is of challenging the VPD on this, but I'm guessing that if it's anything like the RCMP, it's not very good.
What's interesting is the enforcement policy of the Vancouver Police Department in this case. It seems clear that the VPD considered the occupation of land owned by the City of Vancouver to be a criminal action. The next section of the enforcement policy is withheld because of the fact that it is bound in lawyer-client privlege. However, what we do see is that the VPD asked and received Trespass Act Designation from Ernst and Young as well as from the Salt Corporation a month before the action occurred in case the people looking to set up on an abandoned lot.
The reason I requested this information was to get a standard baseline as to what happens when someone normally tries to do an Occupy-style protest in Vancouver. The report was done in January of 2011, which indicates to me that something caused the Olympic Tent Village to be taken seriously before that date. It would be good to see the OccupyVancouver operational plan, which is what I'm going to be requesting from the VPD next.
As usual, here are the documents. These will most likely be posted on the VPD's own website anyway, but in case you don't want your IP logged on their servers, here it is:
- r_11-104531_final.pdf - Hard copy of the General Occurrence Incidence Report, will be in PRIME
- r_11-30769_final.pdf - Hard copy of the General Occurance Incidence Report
- Athletes Village Tent City Operational Plan
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