Vancouver police officers patrol the plaza outside B.C. Place stadium before a 2017 Canadian Championship soccer semifinal is played. Last week, Mayor Ken Sim said that since being elected, more than 175 police officers have been hired, with a net addition of 100 officers.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Ken Sim was elected mayor of Vancouver two years ago in part on a promise to improve public safety during an uptick in stranger attacks and disorder on downtown streets, with his signature commitment focused on hiring 100 more police officers and as many mental-health nurses.
Less than a week after his landslide victory on Oct. 15, 2022, Mr. Sim said at a press conference that the police department had told him it “was completely doable” to complete the first priority within about a year as mayor.
Last week, Mr. Sim said that since then, more than 175 police officers have been hired, with a net addition of 100 officers. He also said the other half of his campaign promise had been more difficult to fulfill, with only 33 mental-health workers hired.
He made the comments at the start of a provincial election campaign in which public safety has emerged as a central issue, while standing outside Vancouver City Hall alongside a coalition of mayors from British Columbia’s other biggest cities as they made an urgent call for Ottawa to address public-safety and mental-health crises playing out across their communities.
But Statistics Canada data and internal Vancouver police staffing figures obtained by The Globe and Mail suggest Vancouver is just over one-third of the way toward making good on the mayor’s pledge on police, because of the number of officers resigning, often to work in other forces, or retiring.
The Vancouver Police Department disputes those numbers, saying 67 members have been added since Mr. Sim’s promise. Earlier this month, Chief Adam Palmer touted the hiring of 175 officers since Mr. Sim was elected, but didn’t mention the attrition among his work force.
The latest data collected by Statistics Canada’s annual Police Administration Survey of departments across the country showed the VPD reported in 2021 that it had 1,322 working officers, 26 members below its budgeted staffing totals for that year. By 2022, there were 21 fewer officers reported by the VPD and only two more (1,303) sworn officers working last year, the last year data is available. Late Friday, the mayor and the VPD sent twin statements saying the department exceeded its budgeted strength in March of this year, before attrition affected this total.
Internal data obtained by The Globe includes a compilation of all the resignations, retirements and hires from the force’s internal web portal – a two-decade archive of all staffing changes that is accessible to all its police and civilian members. That data show 174 officers have been hired since Mr. Sim was elected in October, 2022, but resignations and retirements logged during this period have meant an additional 36 officers.
The mayor declined an interview request last week about the staffing challenges, but his spokespeople sent a statement saying that 100 officers have been added to the force since his election.
Asked Thursday at an unrelated press conference, Mr. Sim said he would be following up with the VPD as to why the department told The Globe that 67 net officer positions had been added during the first half of his term when he had previously understood that number to be 100.
“We’re going to have to get back to you with the breakdown of where this has gone – and if it means we’re now at 60, guess what? We need to hire more people and we’re totally committed to that as well,” he said.
Mr. Sim said public-safety metrics such as the rate of violent crimes reported by citizens have improved during his term, but reiterated the need for more policy reforms from Ottawa, including tougher bail conditions for chronic violent offenders, better policing of ports and funding for more forced psychiatric treatment facilities.
The VPD e-mailed separate statements last week and this week saying the department only reports its staffing numbers to Statistics Canada each spring and that schedule doesn’t account for hiring later in the year.
Constable Tania Visintin, a spokesperson for the department, also said in a statement that the internal assignments and transfers page – which informed the data obtained by The Globe – does not capture all personnel movements “due to sensitive personal or private reasons.”
She said even with hiring 179 officers since October, 2022, there has been natural attrition, leaving a net gain of 67 sworn members. She added that the department is looking forward to the local police academy ramping up its class sizes by 60 per cent starting as early as next year, so that it can graduate up to 288 recruits for the VPD and other municipal police agencies in the province to hire.
Sergeant James Hubert, vice-president of the Vancouver Police Union, which took the rare step of endorsing a mayoral candidate, Mr. Sim, in the last municipal election, said all forces are facing issues recruiting new members, including in Vancouver, where the department is also losing a “trickle” of officers to the nascent municipal force in Surrey as well as other B.C. RCMP detachments.
He said police officers are stressed from increased workloads, noting that the union recently asked the department to provide it with an official breakdown of its staffing as well as the number of vacancies.
Frank Chong, chair of the board of civilians who, with Mr. Sim, oversees the department, said in an e-mailed statement that his organization is aware that the VPD faces challenges in its steady efforts to recruit new officers.
He added that the board “remains appreciative of the efforts by the mayor and council in supporting the VPD to obtain adequate policing resources for a city that is growing in size and complexity.”
Kennedy Stewart, who governed Vancouver for four years before losing the 2022 election to Mr. Sim and returning to teach public policy at Simon Fraser University, said he tried as chair of the police board to improve the department’s public reporting of staffing and finances.
He said there is a provincial system offering sufficient civilian oversight of police officers who use excessive force while on duty, but the new staffing data show a lack of oversight of the overall management of the department.
“The police board is supposed to do that work, but they’re just a bunch of volunteers and they’re essentially captured by the police,” Mr. Kennedy said. “This is an organization that is the largest single expenditure of the City of Vancouver, really in any municipality, but basically has no budget accountability.
“This stuff should be common knowledge: It’s factual – you can’t have your own facts.”