Ken Sim Ran on Manufactured Panic. He Runs the City on Social Murder.

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim is obsessed with keeping the city’s Downtown Eastside on his tongue.

The residents, the neighbourhood, the backdrop – the DTES is Mayor Sim’s electoral weapon of choice, even if the people he weaponizes die under his leadership.

You know Mayor Sim as the Landmark cult enthusiast, the Chip Wilson recruitee, the street sweeps promoter, and the private healthcare profiteer whose company Nurse Next Door receives lucrative Vancouver Coastal Health contracts (all while Sim gives millions in municipal tax dollars to the typically provincially-funded health authority, in what appears to be a conflict of interest).

Last week, Sim added to this dismal list with his announcement of a pause on all “net new supportive housing” in Vancouver. He also stated he is pushing for another series of Vancouver Police Department crackdowns, and wants to amend the DTES Local Area Plan to encourage the construction of market rate housing in the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer district.

All of this was announced at an event hosted by the Save Our Streets coalition with Sim’s party, ABC Vancouver, at the helm. Yet the image of a unified coalition quickly began to crumble. Rebecca Bligh, a city councillor who is part of the ABC-VPD big tent, registered her concern: “It makes no sense,” she told the Vancouver Sun. “I don’t want the province to get the impression that the City of Vancouver is not a good partner in solving our homelessness crisis.”

The wild west of fucking procedure,” as ABC-VPD councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung called it, has seemingly leaked beyond city hall into the functioning of the party. Other Metro Vancouver area mayors pushed back against Sim’s abrupt announcement.

Meanwhile, Peter Meiszner, arguably the city’s most openly fascist councillor, posted on X that the pause in new supportive housing development and accompanying police crackdown would create “a healthier neighbourhood & help people get their lives back.” More than 18,800 Metro Vancouver households currently sit on the BC Housing waitlist.

Sim City is a cop city

But none of this should come as a surprise.

Kareem Allam takes a selfie with Mayor Sim | X

In November 2022, Sim and his then campaign manager Kareem Allam, ran on a violent campaign lie that rode a wave of police manufactured panic to push a cartoonishly pro-police agenda. Sim and his ABC party pushed for a major VPD expansion and received the first police union endorsement in municipal election history. They ran former VPD spokesperson Brian Montague for city council and the longest serving VPD officer at the time, Christopher Richardson, for School Board – dropping him just before the election.

The municipal campaign focused particularly on random stranger attacks, with Sim promising 100 additional police officers to deal with the supposedly spiralling problem. One year later, after the dust settled, the VPD’s own statistics showed that random stranger attacks had actually been plummeting in the months leading up to the election. It didn’t matter though – the damage had already been done, the political scores were settled well in favour of Sim’s ABC majority.

ABC swept to council, winning a comfortable majority of seven seats and the mayorship, as well as majorities on both the Park and School Board. (Three Park Board commissioners and the School Board chair have since left Sim’s ABC as the ship continues to sink).

Three Raccoons’ Ken Sim Hates Poor People patch | Etsy

VPD spokesperson Steve Addison was asked why the department “never produced updated data on stranger attacks in 2022…but he declined to answer,” reports CTV News.

The VPD have also been mum on why their officers accompanied Aaron Gunn on a copaganda youtube video funded in part by the right wing Pacific Prosperity Network supported by Chip Wilson. ABC has been under investigation from Elections BC since April 2024 for potentially contravening campaign rules.

Displacement = death

In addition to the major officer expansion, Sim and the ABC-VPD coalition voted in 2024 to create yet another community policing centre encircling the DTES – this time inside the Woodward’s building.

At a time when VPD officers have the authority to make psychiatric assessments and apprehend people under the province’s Mental Health Act, every additional officer is by default an expansion of forced treatment. In turn, every policy expansion of forced treatment means additional police power. To this end, Sim stood alongside David Eby when the premier announced his vision to expand forced treatment into prisons and broaden the pretences under which forced treatment can be deployed.

(Left to right) Mike Farnworth, David Eby, Carol Lee, Ken Sim, Adam Palmer | Instagram

Sim has repeatedly championed street sweeps, including the incredibly violent Hastings Street decampment in 2023, even though we know displacing people is a practice linked to death.

There are of course beneficiaries to police and city-led displacement, including land speculators and real estate developers, and private and public law enforcement organizations. It was developer Peter Wall who donated $1 million to the Vancouver Police Foundation in 2021 – a private, charitable arm of the VPD – under the condition the money would go toward community policing stations surrounding the DTES.

Still from a video posted by Ken Sim – for the Rolling Stones

By manufacturing the crisis, Sim positions himself as the hero, attempting to justify the renewal of brute force in the eyes of the public. Yet he can only offer empty solutions that further immiserate people trying to survive. Another by-election is looming and Mayor Sim is again showing us his vision: create the conditions for homelessness, and push people living outdoors to die while the wealthiest class and police who support him continue to benefit.

From Tintin Yang, Nate Crompton & Tyson Singh