By David P. Ball
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As Downtown Eastside advocates prepare to hold a memorial Tuesday afternoon for a local man slain by Vancouver police while in distress last week, a legal rights advocate is questioning the officers' response.
Pivot Legal Society policing and criminalization advocate Meenakshi Mannoe told The Pulse on CFRO that police should not be the ones called to situations of individuals in mental distress. In this case, police alleged the naked man who ran onto the street was threatening people with a blade, though that could not be independently verified.
An officer shot the man five times near Princess Ave. and East Hastings Street, according to witnesses and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, who is holding the vigil for victim, who has not yet been publicly identified but is known to neighbourhood residents.
The police department said the man was "brandishing a weapon," and in a statement said the Independent Investigations Office is investigating the conduct of the police officers on scene.
"Paramedics requested help with a 37-year-old man who was acting erratic and aggressive," police Const. Tania Visintin said in a release. "The man had allegedly smashed the window to his room and was throwing large wooden objects out of the window onto the street … The man had left his residence and went to the street with a weapon in his hand.
"Reports came in that this man was chasing people with the weapon and using it in an aggressive and threatening manner."
Mannoe questioned why police needed to shoot the man so many times, and if he even posed any threat since he was not wearing any clothes, and did not have a firearm, and could have been incapacitated in other ways.
And she asked why more mental health supports are not available to B.C. residents, arguing that police should not be the ones sent to calls of people in distress — but that a conversation and reforms are needed about "community safety" that does not involved armed officers.
The Jan. 5 shooting of the 37-year-old man is not the first such incident in the year's first week. Just two days earlier, police shot another man in the Downtown Eastside, sending him to hospital, after he barricaded himself in his apartment allegedly with a rifle.
In a 2018 provincial inquest into the police shooting death of a man in distress who was carrying a wooden plank, the Coroner made a series of recommendations to change police response to mental health calls.