Today there is an increasingly skewed perception about what the private rental market can and can’t do. In the face of unaffordable condo prices, think tanks and governments have promoted rental housing as an affordable housing alternative. The problem is that while the majority of us live in rental housing, that doesn’t make our homes any less of a speculative commodity. Unregulated rental housing, as much as condos throughout the 2000s, is today a growing vehicle of financial investment and real-estate profitability.

On Thursday, January 16, community members, press, and speakers crowded into a media room at Vancouver’s Cambie Street police headquarters. The crowd waited nearly an hour to hear the results of a Vancouver Police Board report on discriminatory bylaw enforcement in the Downtown Eastside. While the report claimed that the Vancouver Police Department is not targeting residents of the Downtown Eastside with bylaw tickets for vending and jaywalking, the crowd left the room visibly frustrated with the results of the decision.

The report was a result of the November 2013 recommendation from the Office of the Police Complaint Commission to address a complaint filed by Pivot Legal Society and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). The complaint, from March 2013, accused the Vancouver Police Department of discriminating and targeting residents of the DTES following documents obtained that showed 76% of jaywalking tickets and 95% of city-wide vending tickets were handed out in the neighbourhood in 2008 in a pre-Olympics ticketing blitz.

Calling the final report “just a whitewash,” Aiyanas Ormond, a VANDU spokesperson, told reporters that the board seems “hell-bent and determined to ignore what are the deeper and substantive issues and complaints.”

 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION | It’s been five years since Mayor Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver were elected on a platform to end homelessness. Since then homelessness has increased, rents have climbed, and Vancouver has witnessed a continued loss of low-income and affordable housing. The title of this three-part series is “Policing the Crisis,” the name of a landmark book on the policing of marginalized communities in 1970’s Britain by Stuart Hall et al. At the dawn of the neoliberal dismantling of the British welfare state, and in a context of entrenched urban inequality, Hall and his co-writers traced the emergence of police power as a tool in the state’s management of the disintegrating social order.

The present series jumps several decades forward, to a different continent, in order to investigate the effects of police-led government in the City of Vancouver. The sole municipal department to receive additional funding in the period 2008-2013 has been the Police, among core services. At a time when the housing crisis continues to deteriorate, the police response has continued to escalate despite the fact that the crime rate has significantly dropped. The purpose of this series is to analyze, contextualize and criticize the role of the police under neoliberal market deregulation, five years after the election of Vision Vancouver in 2008.

During the 2008 municipal election Gregor Robertson put the housing crisis at the center of his campaign, promising to address what he termed a homeless “state of emergency.” Robertson promoted the idea of a businesslike approach to the housing emergency, with clear goals and identifiable “metrics.” Voters were not given details, but the lack of information was presented as strength, signaling Robertson’s capacity for flexibility and creative solutions. When pressured to give more than vague assurances, Robertson pointed to an actual city as a living example of his future plan: Portland, Oregon. Rather than a lofty scheme pulled out of thin air, a letter written by Robertson in March of 2008 proposed the living example of Portland as Vancouver’s “roadmap for change.”[1]