The Tactical Unit at Camp Pekiwewin-A Conversation Transcription.

Based on a transcription of an existing audio interview.
Transcription provided by otter.ai. It has not been verified.

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one of the really, like, interesting moments of just like, the way that police interact with our communities was also at Camp Peckiwewin, which was a large homeless encampment down in the river valley, and prayer and relief camp. And one night, someone got sucker punched, someone called the cops, but every police officer in the city apparently was maintaining the exclusion zone around the Rogers place arena because the Oilers were playing, and this was like height of the pandemic. And so the only unit that could respond to the sucker punch was apparently the tactical unit. So that's who they send down to camp. They roll up in like an APC, they all get out of the van in their like military uniforms, and they stand around doing fuck all, except intimidating people and making it difficult for our, like, Med Team to go and, like, you know, care for this person who had been sucker punched. Because, like, the cops are trying to, like, maintain a cordon before the ambulance shows up, but there's, like, no ambulance in sight. They're nowhere. And like, the person doesn't really need an ambulance. They they were punched. They're a little bit out of it. But like, this is something that can be responded to by like, a nurse. But it just like it was such a bizarre, just like, exercise of force, and just like, it's utterly pointless, and yeah, that was the excuse that we got when we asked the police. It's like, Why the fuck did tactical show up? And they were like, yeah, it was the only unit that was available. Like, who knows if that's true, right? Who knows? But, like, either way, like, it was, it was terrifying. Like, people were really freaked out to have, you know, guys in military combat fatigues, you know, tromping through camp, and you just, like, why are you here? Totally unnecessary, yeah, but it's like, but this is, this is this is how, like, the standard operating procedure works, that it's like, you know, if there is a call that is involving violence, like police need to respond before ambulance can arrive, and like, that doesn't always end up being, like a proportional response. This is what happens with, like, that bureaucratic style of violence, where it's just like, oh yeah, we have to follow the rules. And so some cop has got to go out to attend this thing, even though there's like, it's not like there's an ongoing fight, it's not as though there is like a chronic case of violence in the area. It's just like there was one very brief altercation, and then the result of that is a dozen tactical right? The challenge is that the functional role of police is to make societal problems invisible. And that really stands out when it comes to harm reduction, because it's like, there's this mentality that we need to stop drugs and, like, punish people who use drugs, but it the drug war has been lost, like, very decisively, it is obvious, I think, at this point that, like, you can't police your way out of drug use, at least not without, like, concentration camps filled with people whose only crime is, like being moderate, like unmedicated and trying to, like self soothe with narcotics. Like the the extent of destruction that you would need to do in in our communities to like police out of drug use is just like, comically absurd, and they're trying to do it down in the states, like fuck. And so the so the impact of policing, then, is just to make it invisible, is to push it out of areas where, like, nice people from the suburbs show up and, like, they don't really care if something is happening in, you know, corner of downtown where you don't get a lot of tourists, and you don't get a lot of, like, white collar professionals, and yeah, people from st Albert and yeah. And the impact is and but like that, process is not easy. It's not, you know, pleasant or kind. It ends up just being pointlessly cruel, where you have people who are just trying to survive, just getting constantly pushed around, and it makes things harder. Like it's one of the things that we really notice. And like, you can tell when someone's camp is hungry, because they'll come to outreach, and they will be miserable, and they will have so much less with and because they're having to completely rebuild their life, because, you know, a police officer came through and threw all of their stuff in a dumpster. And it's like, when we think about, when I think about that as someone who, like, owns a home, it's like, yeah, like, imagine if just like, every week someone came through my apartment and threw out everything and changed the lock and I had to, like, figure out how to get back in, right? It'd just be this absolutely catastrophic destruction of someone's life. But because they're forced to live on public land. Somehow this is okay. And I think that's been one of the, like, really noticeable things about encampments and sweeps and stuff like that, is that it's like we see police roaming through Chinatown, like trying to push out all the encampments, but they're pushing them out. They're not getting them off the street, they're not getting them into housing. They end up in Kingsway, and they end up downtown, and they end up in the river valley. And so then the, you know, the police crackdown ends. They say, mission accomplished. Put up the big banner, and then within a few weeks, all the encampments are back in Chinatown. There's been a really interesting there was a really interesting demonstration by Van do the Vancouver drug users union. And I think that's what the acronym stands for. They started to actually, like, build the city saying, like, this is the value of all of people's belongings that were destroyed in a suite.

And it's staggering. It's like hundreds of dollars of people's lives that are just being like routinely destroyed. And we think about the same thing too... like, we think about that as well. Like, one of the things that we really like to give out when we have the money is we buy bulk tents and we give them out to people. And it's like, that is, you know, a pretty big outlay of money. Like, if we give out, I think at one point we had about, like, 10 or 15 tents we were able to bring out about a month. It's like $600 of like, little two person tents, and realizing that it's like, yeah, we give them out one week, and then two weeks later we're giving them out to the same person, because the police trashed the tent. When we think about that from like, How much money do we end up? Because people talk about, you know, the nonprofit industrial complex, just like, spends money on stuff, it doesn't matter, and how much of that is that we are spending money on stuff just to have it destroyed by the police, that it's like we are spending money to restabilize people's lives that are being destabilized by some other public service. It's, it's just like, this game of, like, whack a mole, and we're kind of happy to, kind of like, do that, sort of like, yeah, like, we spend money for EPs to destroy it, and that's fine. And but like, they could not, yeah, they could, like, help us make sure that, like, people's lives are actually getting back together, that we can give them, you know, a good tent, some like fire, safe ways of heating up their like, where they're staying. We can give them, like, food and clothes that they are actually able to, like, store and maintain and eat. And it's like, how much less conflict would there be in our communities if, like, we just provided those things for people.

Recording of conversation with harm reduction community organizer - includes description of multiple incidents and general impacts of police violence.

Edmonton Police Service

Camp Pekiwewin

Anonymous