‘Fear and anxiety’: What our police FOI requests uncovered about Vancouver’s stranger assault scare

A CTV News investigation is raising troubling questions about the way Vancouver police presented data on violent stranger attacks in 2022.

Through 2022, the Vancouver Police Department received a stream of requests from journalists asking about stranger assaults.

It was a municipal election year, and those particular crimes had become a hot-button issue after police shared a troubling statistic in October 2021 showing Vancouver had been seeing an average of 4.2 stranger assaults per day, with the victims attacked entirely at random.

“My editors have asked me to follow up on the latest statistics about crime in the city,” one Vancouver Sun reporter emailed the VPD months later, in January. “They are particularly interested in data on stranger assaults.”

In March, another journalist from Global News pushed for a rare sit-down interview with the police chief to discuss stranger assaults, writing: “We’ve never experienced this as a city before. This is what the public cares about.”

CTV News requested updated data on stranger assaults in July, hoping to understand whether the attacks were continuing at the same pace, but was refused.

• Related: Stranger assaults had plummeted months before Vancouver’s 2022 election. Why didn’t anyone know?

Internal emails obtained through Freedom of Information requests reveal that police were well aware of the intense public interest in these crimes at the time – and also of the “fear and anxiety” news of stranger assaults was causing.

That didn’t stop the VPD from sending out at least 52 news releases referencing stranger assaults in 2022, averaging one per week, and more than doubling the number issued the previous year.

This media strategy coincided with a mayoral race that saw law-and-order candidate Ken Sim promise to significantly increase the police budget if elected.

In April, police spokesperson Sgt. Steve Addison wrote to Deputy Chief Howard Chow and offered him a thread of posts he’d composed for Twitter, now the X platform, highlighting nine stranger attacks that had resulted in arrests.

There was a visually impaired senior who was punched in the stomach, a woman who was stabbed in the leg with a hypodermic needle.

“If you want it, we can help post it to your account,” Addison told Chow. “Good talking points, if nothing else.”

It wasn’t until November 2023 that the public learned, through CTV News reporting, that stranger assaults had been plummeting throughout 2022, already dropping to an average of 1.8 per day in the first half of that year.

B.C.’s public safety minister was not aware of the encouraging development at the time. He deemed stranger assaults the top public safety issue of 2022, and commissioned an independent report, compiled with help from the VPD, that found the attacks were continuing with “alarming frequency.”

No follow-up during election year

What the internal emails do not reveal is why the Vancouver Police Department never provided follow-up data in 2022 – in the midst of a heated election campaign largely focused on public safety issues, during which Sim repeatedly referenced the dated statistic about 4.2 stranger assaults per day.

Sim and his ABC party, including former police constable Brian Montague, ultimately swept into office on a promise to improve public safety by boosting the VPD’s ranks by 100 members.

The hiring of those officers was well underway by the time police produced new data on stranger assaults in 2023. By then, the daily average had dropped even further, to 1.1 per day.

That delayed update led to speculation police had been politically motivated to “fear-monger” the public into supporting Sim, protecting their budget – which has increased by more than $80 million since he took office.

• Related: ‘A very dangerous thing’: Vancouver Police Union slammed for mayoral endorsement

Responding to the Vancouver Sun reporter in February 2022, Addison teased additional data was coming, while explaining how police had produced that first worrying statistic.

“We task our crime analysts to study certain crime trends, and in this case their task was very specific – to review a year’s worth of assault cases and identify how many involved stranger attacks,” Addison wrote.

“We’re continuing to study the issue and hope to obtain updated data at some point this year.”

Asked about the exchange, Addison told CTV News the “updated data” police were hoping for did not include a new daily rate of stranger assaults for 2022.

Addison said he was only referring to a historical comparison of pre-2021 stranger assaults and a neighbourhood breakdown of the crimes, both of which the reporter had requested in an earlier email, and neither of which was ever completed.

He stressed that the 2021 study that produced the statistic about 4.2 attacks per day – and which took a few months to complete – was not repeated at any point in 2022.

“We did not conduct a detailed analytical review of stranger assault files in 2022,” Addison told CTV News, in an email. “Due to the number of ongoing and unsolved investigations, the data would have been unreliable.”

Pressed multiple times for an explanation about why the 2021 data on stranger assaults was considered reliable enough to compile and release to the public but 2022 data was not, Addison said: “Year-to-year data comparisons are less reliable and prone to fluctuations that can be attributed to chance, anomalies, and calculation errors. This was especially true during the pandemic and post-pandemic, when patterns of behaviour changed dramatically from one year to the next, and from month to month.”

“Three-year crime trends, or longer, provide more reliable information that helps us make informed decisions about public safety.”

‘They made a choice’

Mark MacLean, a mathematics professor at the University of British Columbia, found the department’s explanation questionable.

“You’ve already reported one year’s worth of data, you don’t have a leg to stand on to tell me you have to wait for three years of data,” said MacLean.

He argued fluctuations are not a reason to delay reporting, and noted the VPD shares fresh statistics on a wide variety of crimes every month on its website, with caveats about their accuracy.

A year would have been a “reasonable time frame” to produce an updated daily rate of stranger assaults, MacLean said, particularly if the department had provided a similar caveat.

“It’s a whole year, it can give you a sense of what’s going on in the city,” he added. “They made a choice not to do that.”

He also balked at the notion that “calculation errors” would be a serious concern.

“That’s not a natural, statistical thing – it just means you made a mistake,” MacLean said. “Presumably, before they released anything they’d have a couple people check the numbers.”

The decision not to produce an updated rate of daily stranger assaults in 2022 was ultimately made by the director of the VPD’s Research, Planning and Audit team, Addison said.

Police refused multiple requests from CTV News to interview someone on that team.

Addison said police were, in some capacity, studying the stranger assault phenomenon throughout 2022. Task Force Agility and Project Reclaim worked to understand the root causes of stranger attacks and reduce their frequency, and the department was tracking their success in doing so, he said.

Knowing that, the big question is: Did the Vancouver Police Department have any data, at any point in 2022, suggesting the frequency of those attacks was dramatically decreasing?

“No,” Addison said.

Did the public deserve a timely follow-up to the data police had produced one year earlier?

CTV News did not receive an answer to this question.

“Having put that number out there, they should have followed up,” MacLean opined. “I think they have a duty, based on that, to continue to track a statistic like that regularly.”

The VPD eventually produced updated statistics comparing the daily rate of stranger assaults across three years, a process that began in July 2023 and was completed two months later.

Police noted the findings in a report that was presented to the Vancouver Police Board that September, which flagged a “steady decline” in the attacks that had been “continuously monitored,” but provided no specific data.

The department only shared the rate of stranger assaults from 2022 – which reflected a nearly 60 per cent decrease from the 4.2 per day average – following repeated requests from CTV News.

The VPD’s own researchers came to the conclusion the decline was likely due to factors outside the department’s control, including the “return to pre-pandemic daily routines,” which meant “more pedestrians and increased guardianship within public spaces.”

14 months to fulfill FOI requests

CTV News submitted Freedom of Information requests to the Vancouver Police Department in November 2023, hoping to better understand its handling of stranger assault data in the lead-up to the 2022 municipal election.

One sought emails or text messages to or from then-police chief Adam Palmer and Addison that included “stranger assaults” or “stranger attacks.” Another asked for emails or text messages between top brass and the VPD’s spokespeople that referenced “Ken Sim” or the “election.”

It took 14 months for police to fulfill the requests, despite B.C. law requiring that public bodies do so within 30 business days, absent a legally justifiable reason to delay the process.

The VPD never provided such a reason, and only turned over its records after CTV News filed a complaint with the province’s information and privacy watchdog.

That complaint would have forced a public inquiry had police not complied.

• Related: Vancouver police ignore FOI requests for chief’s communications

In the records provided, some email threads end abruptly, such as in May 2022 when the police media team reached out to Dr. Jennie Gill, research advisor for the department, asking for “raw numbers” on stranger assaults and other crimes in response to another request from a Vancouver Sun reporter.

“Do you have them, and if so can you send my way?” Addison wrote. “I’ll take a look and consider whether it’s appropriate to release them.”

No response to that email was included in the FOI material turned over to CTV News.

“If a record was not provided, it means no record exists,” Addison said, when asked about the email thread. “A written response may not have been provided in this case.”

There were no stranger assault records at all from the police chief – no emails or text messages, either incoming or outgoing.

Neither of the FOI requests produced any text messages from anyone.

CTV News followed up on the lack of those records with lawyer Darrin Hurwitz, the VPD’s information and privacy counsel, who said he asked the parties to conduct a secondary search. No additional material was found.

Mike Larsen, president of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, a non-profit advocacy organization, reviewed the records and found some of the gaps concerning.

Text messages are “part of everyday business” for many public sector workers but aren’t always “captured effectively by the FOI process,” Larsen said.

He also noted reports of police using encrypted messaging apps such as Signal to communicate, though none involved the kind of high-profile members subject to the FOIs from CTV News.

On the handling of stranger assault data, Larsen, who is also a criminologist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, said he was “dismayed” by the apparent lack of effort to produce updated statistics in 2022.

“You can see that there’s a public appetite for that information. You can see the police interest, certainly, in talking about these kinds of cases,” he said.

“There was an implied trend, something significant, something novel, something that was raising eyebrows – and then there was a lack of follow-through on that.”

The meta-FOI requests

CTV News filed additional Freedom of Information requests for any communications referencing its earlier FOIs, for additional insight into the process.

What those communications reveal is that all relevant material had been delivered to the VPD’s Information and Privacy Unit by June 2024 – eight months before it was turned over.

Asked to explain the lengthy delay, Hurwitz said: “FOI requests for records based on subject matter or keywords take time to prepare and review.”

On whether his unit has adequate staffing, Hurwitz noted the VPD recently created a co-ordinator position to assist with FOI requests, and said the department “will assess if further resources are needed once this position is established.”

He did not respond to a request to be more specific about why the VPD failed to meet its legal deadline by more than a year.

Larsen reviewed the meta-FOI records as well, and said one thing that immediately stood out to him was the apparent lack of urgency on the part of the VPD.

Nowhere in the correspondence provided was there any mention of legislated timelines or the failure to meet them, Larsen said.

The advocate was also puzzled by how long it took to fulfill a request that was not, in his opinion, “massively complex.”

“There wasn’t, to my mind, a really good explanation for why this took as long as it did,” he added. “If there was an explanation, it’s not in those records that you received and it wasn’t effectively communicated to you.”

While provincial legislation lays out the public’s right to request records and the obligation of taxpayer-funded bodies to provide them, Larsen explained there is no across-the-board standard for how records are stored, archived or retrieved, other than for government ministries.

The result is an ad-hoc approach, unique to each public institution or agency.

“The VPD’s in-house approach here leaves me with a lot of questions about how the FOI process is governed internally, how it’s managed, how things are prioritized,” Larsen said.

For example, by the time Addison was asked to search his emails, the police spokesperson indicated his received messages folder from 2022 had been “purged.”

Absent a requirement to retain records for a certain period of time, there is nothing to prevent them from being deleted or destroyed, Larsen said.

“We have to make sure that these things are preserved and can be retrieved for posterity, or for research, or for accountability purposes,” he said.

While police investigations are meticulously documented with an eye to preserving evidence, Larsen said, there is no indication internal communications about non-criminal matters within the VPD are required to be archived or preserved in a systematic way.

‘Core to our democracy’

The FOI process mostly operates on the honour system, according to B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner Michael Harvey, who spoke to CTV News about the process generally, citing an inability to comment on specific cases.

The person in charge of fulfilling requests asks the relevant individuals or departments to search for and provide records, then reviews them before they are released.

“Unless we have evidence that there’s bad faith dealings, or it is apparent, or there’s some reason to believe that there should be records and there aren’t, then what we assume is that people are operating on a basis of good faith,” Harvey said.

When the process is functioning properly, requests that turn up zero records should be followed up with a request for an additional search, the commissioner said.

That was the case when Hurwitz initially received no material from the police chief related to Ken Sim or the election, and sent an additional email to Palmer’s assistant.

Noting that the FOI request from CTV News covered the months after Sim was elected mayor, a position that automatically makes him chair of the Vancouver Police Board, Hurwitz asked: “There is nothing?”

The VPD’s FOI response ultimately included a letter of congratulations from Palmer to the mayor-elect following the October 2022 election. This was the most substantial record from the police chief in either FOI.

Being transparent and accountable by producing relevant responses in a timely manner is not an “administrative burden,” Harvey said, but should be understood as a “a core of the mission of public service and core to our democracy.”

Overall, Harvey’s office is seeing a steady increase in what are known as “deemed refusal” complaints, like the ones submitted by CTV News in this case – from 235 in 2022-23, to 264 in 2023-24, to 348 in 2024-25.

But once the information is handed over, regardless of how long it takes, the complaint is considered resolved and the file is closed – an outcome Harvey acknowledges can be unsatisfying for those seeking accountability.

“It all happens very quietly,” Harvey said. “There’s no obvious negative consequences for the public body and nothing ever enters the public domain.”

While the OIPC does track complaints and can take action if a problematic pattern is identified, reporting on individual cases can also be a way to effect change, the commissioner said.

“People need to notice that a public body is not meeting its obligations, and the public body needs to feel that pressure.”