Council passes motion giving police access to Vancouver’s traffic cameras: city

Vancouver city council passed a motion Wednesday granting police access to the city’s traffic camera network.

The motion was put forward by ABC Couns. Peter Meiszner and Brian Montague and passed with only one councillor in opposition.

The motion report suggests that police access to traffic camera networks could enhance their operational capabilities.

“Real-time integration and access to the City’s traffic camera network by the Vancouver Police Department could significantly enhance the VPD’s operational capabilities by providing real-time visual information that allows for a more effective and efficient deployment of police resources to incidents as they occur, not only for quicker response times but also for more informed and effective decision-making in critical situations,” it says.

Coun. Pete Fry, who was in opposition to the motion, said he feels it violates some charter rights combined with “unfettered access to surveillance.”

“In my opinion, we should have access to those video feeds through a warrant.”

The council also heard from various speakers in support of and against the motion.

Nina Taghaddosi, a speaker at the council meeting who says she is a Registered Social Worker in B.C. spoke in opposition to the motion. She said that police having this kind of access to cameras is not warranted.

The social worker explained that traffic cameras are meant to monitor traffic patterns and not to collect personal information.

“When people are in public space, we still have a fundamental and constitutional right to privacy,” she said.

“Police powers to search people are limited to certain situations, and especially by the need to obtain a warrant from a judge, we’re very concerned that it’s unconstitutional to provide the police with unlimited and unsupervised access to the city’s video surveillance network.”

Taghaddosi also mentioned that for decades, human rights organizations in Vancouver have been pointing out that CCTV cameras endanger people living and working in public spaces, particularly in the Downtown Eastside.

“Gentrification has resulted in abysmally low availability of safe and affordable housing and shelter options,” she said, adding that only those with money have the rights to privacy.

“We have to acknowledge the high level of stigma and criminalization towards people who rely on public space for their survival when we consider that increasing police’s access to public surveillance tools,” she said.

Various speakers spoke in favour of the motion, believing it would enhance their safety in public.

According to the motion report, the City of Vancouver currently has 221 cameras. As it stands, traffic footage is not accessible to the police, and live feeds from traffic cameras are not recorded or stored.

Coun. Montague, a former Vancouver Police Department officer, explained that during a traffic incident, police currently don’t have access to any traffic camera footage to find out what happened.

“They felt it would be extremely valuable. I, unfortunately, had to tell them that that evidence doesn’t exist,” he said.

“The police have tools at their disposal that are far more intrusive than what we’re asking them to be allowed to use here … in order to make our streets safer for everybody.”

‘Incredibly disappointing’ to see this motion pass: Vancouver criminal lawyer

In an interview with 1130 NewsRadio, criminal lawyer Kyla Lee with Acuman Law said the city passing this motion is “incredibly disappointing,” because it brings up issues under the Criminal Code of Canada.

“The government has already prohibited police from essentially using electronic equipment to monitor and surveil people,” she said.

Lee said there are already provisions in place where police can obtain a warrant if they want to engage in any electronic surveillance of individuals.

“Essentially, what the Vancouver Police are doing, with the approval of city council, is bypassing provisions of the Criminal Code that are designed to protect individual privacy rights and using city installed traffic cameras to justify incursions into privacy.”

She explained the implications of something like this have never been seen before and could be vast.

“This could mean that police officers without any even suspicion that somebody is engaged in criminal activity, can monitor their whereabouts, can monitor who they’re interacting with, and can even eavesdrop on private conversations for the purposes of determining whether or not a crime might be committed or might be about to be committed, or might have been committed,” Lee said.

The criminal lawyer believes this going to be used disproportionately against marginalized people in the community, such as “members of the unhoused community, drug users, Indigenous people, Black people and racialized people.”

Lee said this is the kind of thing you don’t see in Canada normally, and it represents a “sad state of where things are with city council in Vancouver and the ABC majority.”

She believes that the party’s close relationship with the police department is the reason they’re given this kind of “unprecedented level of power” to interfere with people’s privacy.

“This is something that can be walked back if enough people are concerned about it. I also hope that civil liberties organizations and public interest groups in Vancouver are going to be keeping track of the way in which this data is being used by the Vancouver Police Department,” she said.

Lee said people can monitor this by conducting a freedom of information request to the police department and the city separately to figure out how this data will be used.

She explained that the balance between “public safety and the need to prevent crime from happening” and investigating ones that have occurred is important, and that’s why there are provisions in the Criminal Code that allow for these processes where police can follow with judicial authorization and act when the court deems appropriate for them to do so instead of “seeking a workaround that upsets the balance between personal privacy and protection of the public.”

Police gaining access to traffic cams has become commonplace in many major cities in Canada. In Surrey, police used city surveillance footage in their investigation into he death of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023.

Meiszner says the footage will only be viewed on an as-needed basis, and privacy concerns will be taken into consideration.

“It would only be accessible to people within the operations command centre in the VPD, and there needs to be strong rationale to access that footage…it’s not a surveillance tool, I certainly would be uncomfortable with that,” Meiszner said.

“And there will be privacy safeguards in place. The cameras are owned by the [City of Vancouver] and the city will be storing the footage.”

City staff now has to come up with a detailed plan on the costs of recording and storing the footage before council votes on the 2025 budget in December.

-With files from Benjamin Bouguerra and Cecilia Hua.