Busy BC Day long weekend leads to largest police deployment of the year
Posted August 1, 2015 8:51 am.
Last Updated August 1, 2015 9:05 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It’s an extremely busy long weekend in the City of Vancouver and that means the biggest deployment of police officers all year to keep an eye on things.
Where you’ll see the most members will be at the Celebration of Light at English Bay. Canada is slated to light up the sky around 10pm to wrap up the event for another year.
There will be hundreds of officers on the ground, on horseback, on bikes, in the air and on the water.
Vancouver Police Constable Brian Montague says they haven’t had any major issues over the past few years and he has a message for anyone thinking about causing chaos. “This is a family-oriented event so if you’re thinking about coming down here to cause problems we don’t want you. If you do decide to come down — one of our officers will explain personally why we don’t want you here.”
“We’re working with other agencies, but for the most part, individuals who are going to come down and cause problems are not too difficult to pick out of a crowd. They usually draw a lot of attention to themselves, so our officers will deal with them and in some cases we’ll put them in a paddy wagon and get them out of the area. If they’re going to cause problems to a point where it’s going to be a breach of the peace — we simply can’t have that in such a large crowd. It has the potential to cause really big problems.”
“We do have other days where the Celebration of Light takes place but then of course on this weekend, on top of that, we also have concerts, Pride events — together, it’s the biggest deployment of officers we’ll have,” explains Montague.
The other big event tonight is the Taylor Swift concert which will see tens of thousands of people pack into BC Place. “We’ll have officers assigned to that as well just in case problems do arise we can deal with them quickly. We don’t want to have to draw resources from other parts of the city to deal with something inside the stadium. Our officers are called in on their days off to police these events whether it’s concerts, sporting events or the Celebration of Light,” adds Montague.
And the Pride Parade is tomorrow in Downtown Vancouver which is expected to cause some traffic tie-ups.
