“They could have killed the man”: Police cars as weapons
In 2017, after a VicPD officer saw a cyclist without a helmet, they “drove recklessly” after them. The officer cut…
Island Health plans new, “healthier” hostile design
Outside Island Health’s doors at 1250 Quadra Street, rocks are cemented in place. A “Private Property” sign, which threatens arrest…
FOI data shows extent of VicPD “use of force”
The B.C. government collects “use of force” data from police departments and publishes some of that data online. That data,…
Mapping Victoria’s fake public space
This post is about spaces and agreements that may exclude people from privately-owned ‘public’ property. All of the land in question…
VicPD’s street checks are racist, because of course they are
Update: A December 2019 follow-up post with a decade of street check data from all of B.C.’s municipal police departments…
Hostile bench seeks loving and supportive wrench
One of the first posts I wrote for this site was about the city’s hostile benches, where “arm rests” are…
136 people are peeing in Victoria right now
Building on some Internet math, Statistics Canada data, and an average pee time of 21 seconds and 6.5 pees per…
Bike rack benches and fancy granite
Two years ago this month I wrote about some new un-sleepable benches that were coming to Victoria at Douglas and…
A potpourri of displacement
In 2016, an officer with VicPD’s Community Services Division responded to “concerns with trespassing, open drug/alcohol use and drug paraphernalia/needles/feces…
Forts on Fort
Nobody loves defensive architecture quite like Fort Street. Outside of business hours, locked gates block alcove after alcove. One gate…
School district removes Spring Ridge Commons furniture
Spring Ridge Commons was created in 1999 as a “community urban food forest.” On February 4, 2019, the principal of…
Shorter walls are in for 2019, but defensive architecture is still defensive architecture
On October 24, 2019, Victoria City Council will consider a report about whether one of the Pandora Avenue fences will…
Keeping police out of Victoria and Esquimalt schools
Update: June 2021 presentation to SD61’s school liaison officer committee. In 2018, when Esquimalt rejected the Victoria Police Department’s request…
B.C. police departments disproportionately street check Indigenous and Black people
Over a decade of data obtained from B.C.’s municipal police departments through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests show the departments…
Defensive architecture on tour (Part 1)
Like bad takes about bike lanes, defensive architecture is a blight spread across Greater Victoria’s 13 municipalities. After spending $1.50…
Defensive architecture on tour (Part 2)
Needs More Spikes’ CRD defensive architecture tour wraps up this week. Find part one here. Oak Bay First up this…
Junk buildings
With the Northern Junk development back in the news in September, I checked to see if the proposal had any…
Enforcing ‘community’ through Block Watch
Victoria Council will continue to fund displacement in the name of community-building in 2021. The city’s defensive architecture guidelines don’t…
VicPD “crime watch” volunteers are watching licence plate stickers
My last post was about VicPD and the city bringing Block Watch policing into neighbourhoods under the guise of community…
VicPD drug seizure and arrest data
Last year I filed several Freedom of Information (FOI) requests with VicPD. Two of those FOIs were modeled directly off…
“Contact with a police vehicle”
On December 21, 2018, VicPD put out a press release with the headline “Witnesses sought after assault with a weapon.”…
General occurrence report data highlights systemic racism in B.C. policing
Policing in B.C. is and always has been racist. Here’s some information from an FOI request for six years of…
Transit Police continue to target BIPOC people
Metro Vancouver’s Transit Police have always targeted BIPOC people, in particular Black and Indigenous people. This post summarizes FOI data…