STANLEY CUP RIOT: Police make changes five years later

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Five years following the Stanley Cup Riot in Downtown Vancouver, police have changed the way officers are deployed in a serious situation.

They say they were prepared for that night, but what made the Riot unique was how big the crowd was with more than 150,000 people crammed in the downtown core — crimes committed ranged from mischief to assault to arson.

And what slowed the investigation was the misinformation the VPD say they received when appealing for help.

“We would get tips through social media or through the ‘wanted’ posters that we put out indicating that a photo that was displayed was of a specific individual and we would get six, seven, eight, nine, 10 tips on this individual, but they weren’t all the same. Six people might have said that they were one person, and another four would say that it looked like somebody completely different. But we can’t just pick the name that comes up most frequently. We have to actually investigate every single tip that we get. We have to, not only, confirm that someone did commit a crime, but that all the other names that were given to us — we have to exclude them. We have to still investigate those names and confirm that they are not the person we are looking for,” explains Constable Brian Montague, who was a member of the Integrated Riot Investigation Team.

“Social media helped us in the beginning, there’s no doubt about it, but after all that evidence was compiled and put together, social media became a bit of a hindrance. We ended up getting tips from people through social media who took our investigators on wild goose chases to dead ends and it was really time consuming.”

Montague says while they worked on that aspect of the case, the force also did a self-autopsy and realized something. “We didn’t have a system in place to deal with officers who wanted to come in on their days off and self-deploy. We do now. If officers do want to come in [then] we have a way to know that they want to come in, track them and assign them to a squad so we can account for them.”

He adds they also have access to better technology today than they did five years ago.

LISTEN: NEWS 1130’s Sonia Aslam speaks with VPD Constable Brian Montague about the Riot

And despite the massive crowd that night, Montague also feels they’ve come a long way, pointing out — it took them half the time to control everyone in 2011 compared to the ’94 Riot, but there are some misconceptions about that.

“There’s a perception that we can go in with a bunch of less lethal ammunition and start spraying ARWEN bullets everywhere and I think when you talk to people they truly believe that. We are responsible for everybody. We’re responsible for the stores, for the people who are down there who aren’t participating and for our officers. And if we do deploy an ARWEN round at someone we now have to wade into a crowd of thousands to pull this person out and get them medical attention. So, we have to be very careful when we do deploy a weapon like that. We can’t shoot someone with a bean bag, an ARWEN or pepper spray and then just leave them,” adds Montague.

“It’s a hostile environment. You can’t send a couple of officers into a group of 300 or 400 people to pull one person out of there. We are very hesitant to deploy that to begin with.”

The investigation cost police $2 million and the damage sustained downtown was about $3 million.