Content warning: The officers blog posts will likely be disturbing for some, and topics of police violence and harassment are discussed in this article. 

“I squeezed out the contents of the needle,” writes Vancouver Police Department (VPD) officer Steve Addison in 2012, “and used my boot to sweep the debris into a tidy pile.” 

Addison next details his frustration when an Insite employee is concerned about the officer’s unceremonious disposal of someone’s drug supply. Seemingly irritated, Addison outlines his personal expectation in his blog – he had hoped instead for the Insite staff to read out statistics about the positive impacts of the safe injection site to the person that Addison had just seized drugs from.

Drug seizures have been linked to increased overdoses, often compelling purchase from lesser known sources, alongside other harms. According to data from 2017–2024, the VPD conducts thousands of minor drug seizures every month. The VPD conducted a higher raw count of small drug seizures in the time period following BC’s “decriminalization” framework than prior.

The VPD have recently (boldly) claimed that “possession seizures” have declined to zero under decriminalization. This seems to be a new term made up to only account for one type of drug seizure: seizures where officers record personal possession as the primary concern, rather than total drug seizures for any cause. It remains unclear how behaviour like Addison’s above fits into these definitions.

A few years after Peace Arch News reporter Steven Addison dropped the ‘n’ from his first name and became VPD officer Steve, he started writing a blog outlining what he and other police did on shift — and offered some insight into his rationale. 

Addison was uncertain that the VPD would let him put his blog on their website, and was pleasantly surprised when they supported it. “To seek such a powerful platform was a big ask on my part,” he writes. 

As a leading agent in the drug war for decades, the VPD have been drivers of misinformation, opaque processes and lies. The VPD have lied about the dangers of touching fentanyl (such dangers do not exist), which may make people overly cautious, and deter them from responding to overdoses; and stoked fear about increased stranger attacks during an election, which later turned out to be misleading (the cop-endorsed council would win the election). Addison has been a key part of the force’s public relations since his 2012 blog, and is currently a VPD spokesperson. 

The blog, called Eastside Stories: Diary of a Vancouver beat cop, centered Addison’s perspective, and was reviewed positively in a Globe and Mail column from the time. The column, however, did cite a critique from David Eby, who was apparently not a fan of the blog. 

“Instead of making fun of poor people with mental health issues, maybe there’s a better use of the @vancouverPD account,” Eby wrote in a now deleted post, according to the column. 

The blog is no longer accessible on the VPD server (for some reason) — but a number of Addison’s posts were archived in the Wayback Machine.

For Addison’s part, he previously wrote that, “it would sure be nice to see a little more ‘don’t do,’ and a little less ‘how-to’ when it comes to drug education. But maybe that’s just me,” sharing his thoughts on sterile crack pipe kits, which by then already shown for years to reduce the spread of infections, among other benefits.

Another day on shift, Addison describes “the pretty redhead [who] pleaded as I grabbed her arm to prevent her from running away” from him near Columbia and Hastings, who he believes is 18 years old.

“My god,” he continues, “she looked young. Dressed in jean shorts and a button-up shirt that was tied in a knot just above the belly button, she looked like she should have been riding a tire swing at the family cottage, not getting high.” He then writes he felt “that there was still a chance to save her,” before she asked a second time for him to physically let her go. Addison is now the police force’s spokesperson. 

On another night, Addison describes someone under his supervision having only one reliable vein left in his body, in their genitalia. Addison claims the person would “happily” use the vein more “if only he could find more dope.” Here, Addison’s assessment is both voyeuristic and assumptive.

The former reporter-turned-VPD spokesperson also tries his hand at poetry, one time writing four lines about someone who passed away, and another about why he is a cop:

“Because I love being a cat amongst the pigeons / Because I work with a great partner / Because I don’t have to wear a tie or sit at a desk / Ties and desks suck / Because sometimes I get to drive fast.”

A poem by Steve Addison

For some, this last line may recall that a VPD officer recently tragically drove into a pedestrian in the DTES while speeding. In May 2024, shortly after the guilty officer received only a fine, a different VPD officer hit a pedestrian in the DTES.

According to Addison, the VPD are “the last resort for people with nowhere else to turn.”

Yet in describing his work, he and his coworkers do not seem to be doing much to help. During one night shift, Addison writes that he and his partner were “skulking around Chinatown,” before a cyclist came “screaming through the intersection and rounded the corner. He was riding it like he’d stole it.” (In this vein, Addison would rationalize a group of officers beating up a senior because of his “tenor of violence” in 2023).

Addison reminds readers that police “get paid to be suspicious, and this guy definitely got our spidey-senses tingling.” Eventually Addison catches the person he calls “the bad guy on the bike,” who he has not yet spoken to. The story does not refer to any formal charges. 

Addison also gives readers some understanding of how police see themselves as building relationships with community members. “I’ve developed a bit of a soft-spot for her,” he says in one post, “and her a lukewarm respect for me, despite me having to put her in jail well over a dozen times.” Addison clarifies that on this particular night, he and his partner seized her drugs without intent of arresting her, before aiming to criminalize the person who they think gave her drugs.

“She shuffled away, grumbling under her voice about how we made her look like a rat.” 

He assumes that the person next to her is, in his words, “a predatory drug dealer.” The person then reports having college degrees. This is so shocking for Addison that he decides not to arrest him after all, and instead pays for a taxi ride away. 

Addison puts effort into reminding people that police “are de-facto psychiatrists. We are front-line social workers. We are there to protect society from criminals and predators.” 

One day Addison is seemingly made more desperate by the state of things, lamenting that “[t]oo many times I’ve responded to a domestic assault where the victim claims she fell down. Too many times I’ve found a stabbing victim surrounded by a crowd of witnesses who claim they saw nothing. And too many times I’ve been snookered at the door of a shelter, a needle exchange or a supervised injection site by a staff member who claims my presence makes their ‘clients’ feel uncomfortable.” Addison cannot seem to understand why there’s a “cone of silence” and apprehension about talking to the police, which he calls “shameful.”

One day Addison is musing about the work life of a retired officer he meets, who, as Addison describes it, worked at a time when there was, “no police complaints commissioner breathing down his neck every time he said something that might hurt someone’s feelings.” He reflects on times when “[w]omen who got paid to have sex were called whores, not sex-trade workers.” For Addison, this was a time when “police officers didn’t worry about mincing words.”

The blog post is incredibly disturbing and sinister in parts, including the following passage (cw: police violence).

One day, Addison walks us through a scenario where he is deciding if he will shoot to kill someone. Addison reports yelling over and over at someone to “drop a knife.” He assesses this person as someone he recognizes as “[d]rug addicted, volatile and severely mentally ill.” Addison writes he was “prepared to shoot this man,” adding that he was “staring down the wrong end of a gun.” Addison then claims to address the person directly, and they empty their hands, with no sign of the suspected knife Addison professed to be yelling about, all while escalating the situation.

All of this is presented in the officer’s own words — with no voice or non-police editorial standards challenging him. 

Addison writes that during this event, he became empathetic for his “several police brothers and sisters who have been left with no choice but to shoot and kill, and the reality is some of the victims have been mentally ill.” Addison does not appear to see the role of policing in generating this type of violence. 

Researchers have analyzed police documents from the same time period. One study published in the the journal of Critical Social Policy wrote, “[n]egative stereotypes and representations that uncritically align dangerousness with mental illness are repeated and pronounced.” In 2022, the VPD killed at least 5 people. In 2022-2023, the BC Office of the Police Complaints Office and Independent Investigations Office received a combined 1,903 notifications. 

Still, Addison reasons in another blog post, “it’s painfully obvious that we simply are not going to arrest our way out of this crime and drug epidemic.” 

“The Downtown Eastside already boasts the highest number of arrests in the city,” he adds.  

That realization did not stop the VPD budget from ballooning from $213 million to over $400 million since Addison’s last blog post. Meanwhile, VPD Chief Adam Palmer predicts that he and his staff will demand $500 million from the city by 2028. And the realization has not eliminated police from legally employing their own mental health assessments to detain people experiencing mental health crises, nor has it stopped harmful drug seizures, nor stopped the police from guiding BC’s drug decriminalization framework.

Wherever solutions of community safety may lie – Addison made it painfully clear we won’t find them in these archived ramblings of a VPD officer. 

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