Homeless people have to set up camp in downtown's Oppenheimer Park to protest against ticketing those who are forced to sleep in the park.

Credit: Doug Shanks

Advocates decry ticketing of homeless

With over 40,000 reported instances of people being turned away from full-capacity shelters in the Metro Vancouver region over the past year, the city’s homeless are often left with little or no choice but to sleep in parks and alleyways. Recently, a rash of ticketing by police in the city’s parks has further upset an already desperate situation for homeless people.

Police sweeps of Oppenheimer Park, in the 400 block of Powell Street, have been occurring with increasing frequency over the past three weeks. They typically happen in the early morning hours, between 4 and 6 a.m. Community advocates equate it to kicking someone when they’re already down.

“Ticketing people for sleeping outside, [when] there’s nowhere else for them to go, is unconstitutional, when people are faced with no available housing and no available shelter beds,” says Pivot Legal Society lawyer Laura Track. “People have been sleeping outside in Oppenheimer Park for months, if not years, and from what I gather from the community down there, [ticketing] is new to them.”

Wendy Pedersen, a Downtown Eastside resident and Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) organizer, agrees with Track’s assessment that the ticketing appears to be a new policing strategy. “I think this is part of a hidden agenda,” she says, “and I think [the police feel like] they need to start putting this into play if they’re going to move people out for the Olympics.”

But according to Const. Jana McGuinness of the Vancouver Police, ticketing in Oppenheimer Park isn’t new, nor does it happen regularly. “I have to stress it’s very infrequent,” she says. “You can’t camp in a park, so that by-law, from time to time, has to be enforced. If people don’t move along, which has sort of been the case [in Oppenheimer Park] over the past week — there’s a few people that have remained after they were given a couple day’s notice to head out of the park — then some by-law tickets were issued to those people.”

McGuinness says that the VPD is “doing what we’ve always done,” which includes enforcing park by-laws wherever illicit camping takes place. “From our perspective, that’s not different,” she says. “There’s reasons, too. You can’t have campfires in a park — it’s a hazard. That’s our general practice; that hasn’t changed over the years, and it’s no different with respect to people camping in Oppenheimer Park or any other park. You can't camp in a park. It's pretty clear."

But due to the fact that people sleeping in parks are often left with no other choice, Pedersen and other Downtown Eastside advocates are calling for the City to exempt Oppenheimer Park from regular park by-laws that would otherwise crack down on camping in parks. "People are very, very upset about this," says Pedersen. "People are like, 'what do we do?' They already don't know what to do, because there's no housing. And now [here's] this extra layer of harassment and poor-bashing. It's over the top. And shame on the city for not calling this an emergency in their [recently-released] Homeless Action Plan report."

Another dubious aspect of the police ticketing lies in the tickets' ambiguous consequences. "The fine is determined at a by-law hearing," says McGuinness. "Regarding paying fines, this is not something we administer."    

"Isn't that strange?" says Pedersen. "People can't actually raise money to pay off their tickets and get off the record. City by-law tickets have no corresponding fees."

Pedersen likens the police ticketing in Vancouver to what happened in Atlanta in anticipation of its summer Olympics in in 1996. "People [in Atlanta] got minor tickets that ended up being an excuse police used when they needed to move people along," she says. "Once they get logged in the system as repeat homeless offenders, then they will be vulnerable to future arrests related to move people out for the Olympics."

Since Pedersen and other protesters set up camp in Oppenheimer Park on the night of July 17, there have been no further reports of tickets received in the park. The VPD has advised the Pivot Legal Society--who have publicly claimed plans to contest the tickets in court--that people will not be arrested for sleeping in parks, but they will continue to get tickets if they fail to comply with city by-laws.