From periphery to focal point: Taking community direction to challenge assumptions

The idea for a Downtown Eastside police accountability initiative flowed from the memberships of VANDU and the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society (WAHRS) to the academy. In other words – it came from the community to the university, rather than from the university and imposed on a community.

There are so many people who urgently deserve justice, who deserve answers, who deserved better in life, and whose families and surviving loved ones are leading the work toward all these things. P.O.W.E.R. is one group among many challenging the machinery of violence, harm and killings by law enforcement. Likewise, P.O.W.E.R. learns from and incorporates safety and harm reduction strategies from other groups and communities who challenge over-policing.

Police officers continue to face relatively little consequence from the official oversight bodies in BC. Over the years, VANDU and WAHRS had received informal reports of police incidents and followed up on them as best as they could with the resources available. By then, parts of the initiative had already been established, particularly through the leadership of then-VANDU staff Vince Tao.

The invaluable feature of P.O.W.E.R. growing from the street upward came with the reality of an extended timeline to get off the ground. It is more common for researchers to enter a community with their own funding, set parameters of study, and the approval of a university research ethics board. During the first P.O.W.E.R. meetings, the group had no title, no funding, no research ethics board approval, and no established design or protocols. Instead, every step of the project was co-designed and submitted (with approvals then waited on) collectively. P.O.W.E.R. began operations in June 2024, and each aspect has been strengthened by being grounded within and directed by community members. This longer, intentional process has helped foster strong cohesion and buy-in into the project, because each of these components has been transparent and the rationales shared across the membership along the way.

Multiple members of P.O.W.E.R. have lived in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) for decades. Many of the members do not have ambitions to become employed by academic institutions. For this reason, contributions from many members often have less to do with academic career pursuit or letters after names (aka ‘alphabet soup’) – but rather leveraging the institution as a tool for empowering community and building resistance to organized abandonment, harm and outright violence. This dynamic contributes to keeping the intentions behind the project situated within and more accountable to the community.

The DTES has been researched extensively – and as others have noted, including authors of Research 101: A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the DTES, there are often dozens or more research projects occurring in the community at a given time.

Without community-direction, studies can fall into the trap of becoming “swiss cheese research.” This is research that reflects a performance of participants in its findings – i.e., participants in a heavily researched neighbourhood systemically giving information to outsider-observers based on what it seems like they want to hear.

Community direction protects from research becoming swiss cheese in at least three ways: 1) people who participate can see that the intentions are, at the very least, backed by some community members; 2) research findings go through an extensive community review for a more accurate reflection of community life or social issues prior to publication; and 3) community members are able to conduct data collection themselves, offering an alternative gaze to an outsider-observer.

(The authors give a nod to Research 101 who have previously ensured access to courses on the Tri-Council Policy: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans for non-academics, incl. people who use drugs, to further decentralize research, which P.O.W.E.R. has benefitted from).

In concrete terms, many members who live in the neighbourhood are not about to leave – and face accountability for their public facing roles in research, including within P.O.W.E.R.

Community-directed research can guide academic researchers to identify issues that are considered localized priorities, and may have not come to mind of academic institution-based researchers. Community-directed projects therefore have a high potential to meaningfully inform policies and programs that directly affect the community involved.

In 2023, in collaboration with VANDU and Pivot Legal Society, researchers at SFU published a peer-reviewed study – which contributed to the inter-organizational relationships at the foundation of P.O.W.E.R. – which characterized documented harms associated with police drug seizures without arrest. Had the academic researchers not adequately engaged with the community, they would not have added questions about this policing practice into their major study – which drew on insights from 995 participants.

This study became part of the evidence in a successful legal challenge against BC's attempted (but repealed) public drug consumption ban, which was set to increase police tools to criminalize people suspected of using drugs in 2023. The study was cited by the Chief Justice of the BC Supreme Court in his decision that the legislation would cause “irreparable harm.”

P.O.W.E.R. aims to build on these histories to continue to reveal the nature of these processes of dehumanization – practices the group considers to be “legalized harassment” at the very least, and often much worse – using multiple tools.

P.O.W.E.R, like other community-directed research projects, leverages research resources to facilitate skill and capacity building. P.O.W.E.R. members with more experience have mentored members who are in their early stages of engaging and/or leading research already.

P.O.W.E.R. members have found that some people who come and share their stories express that, at the very least, the reporting system offers a place to vent, get things off their chest, and speak openly, with confidentiality if needed. P.O.W.E.R. has also facilitated support groups for and by people negatively impacted by law enforcement on an ad-hoc basis.

This is in contrast to the province’s police oversight system, where formal complaints about officers are seldom addressed adequately. The formal police complaint process via the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner, the body that manages most cases that are below the threshold of serious harm or death, means that “admissible” complaints are sent directly to the police department where the officer is employed to begin the resolution process.

There are no official supports, resources or services specifically for people harmed by police, or the community of people, including family members, impacted by a police killing.

Evidence and research

As a group, P.O.W.E.R. contributed to a study on the impacts of ‘street sweeps’ in Vancouver – the study brought attention to the links between the forced displacement of people in public space, and the increased likelihood of experiencing public health harms, including overdose.

Last month P.O.W.E.R. published their peer-reviewed research in the International Journal of Drug Policy.

In brief, the study shows some ways in which people who use drugs continued to experience criminalization during the periods of the province’s decriminalization pilot, including after the 2024 “recriminalization” amendment (which excluded the decriminalization pilot from essentially all urban outdoors spaces). Participants shared multiple, alarming examples of police physically interfering with overdose responses during the ongoing toxic drug emergency.

Members' own experiences informed the study’s analysis: how the carrying of everyday items, such as tools, is perceived differently by police if you are coded as a ‘drug user’ or DTES resident by officers. Members spoke on other shared experiences with participants, including perceptions of unreasonable searches by police officers in Vancouver.

Province-wide research completed earlier by the BC Centre on Disease Control similarly found that 51% of people who use drugs continued to experience harassment and intimidation by police during decriminalization, even before the recriminalization amendment was implemented.

Moving forward

P.O.W.E.R. exists amid the continued professionalization and leveraging of publicly-funded police public relations departments, alongside a shrinking and fractured media landscape, while social media is largely becoming concentrated in the hands of the few.

Some of P.O.W.E.R. 's tools are direct approaches – the distribution of goods, tracking police practices, running support groups, doing presentations and talking to people in the community, while others are more conceptual, i.e., finding ways to bring the truth to light. Neither set of approaches are particularly useful without direction and reciprocity. And the work has just started.

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Photographs provided by Jackie Dives; and support with coordination and editing on this post from Ben Ingoldsby and Sunny Manhas