Three downtown streets identified as hot spots
Photo by Mordechai Dangerfield on flickr
The three streets in the city’s downtown business improvement area were identified recently as crime hot spots in city assessments to determine the need for expansion of the Downtown Ambassadors Program.
Vancouver city hall is recommending that council adopt a one-year $237,000 contract with the Downtown Business Improvement Association to extend the program.
The three streets are Granville, Georgia and Robson. They are “hot spots” because of people identified as “druggies, panhandlers and rough sleepers”. In fact the same people fit all three “categories”. And the Ambassadors do nothing more than move them along to another street somewhere else. They do nothing to solve the problem.
This is the same approach that failed with street prostitution.
And it is promoted by the same mindset that sees the needle exchange and the safe injection site as causes of more “problems”. And is not going to work this time any more than it has worked in the past.
Of course the customers of downtown businesses do not like seeing reminders of how useless our social policies are. The failures are societal, not just of the individuals who find they can only cope with adversity though self medication.
The problem has been growing steadily. The Tyee recently showed how inadequate even an apparently simple count of those affected was recently. And the response has been - from all levels of government - totally inadequate. But shows no sign of change. $237,000 might provide a few beds for a few nights. Or some dry socks. But the City and the BIA would rather chivvy people than help them.
CCTV coming to a bus in your neighbourhood
Straight Talk By Carlito Pablo
Publish Date: July 26, 2007
TransLink has approved a budget of almost $4 million to install “security cameras and video recording equipment” on the region’s bus fleet.
Andrew Pask , coordinator of the Vancouver Public Space Network , to1l0d the Straight that he’s concerned about the installation of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras on buses. “People should be able to use public spaces without having to be recorded, without having their movement tracked, their conversations taped, their actions videoed,” he said. “People should have that right. When you start infringing on it, you start inching ever closer to a police state.”
People should also have the right to be able to travel in safety at any time of day in any part of the city by public transport without the fear of being assaulted, or the victim of “steaming”, or witnessing an attack on a driver. Far too many dangerous incidents still occur despite the use of radio to summon assistance, and the presence of additional staff on key routes in bad areas late at night. Bus drivers should not be in fear of their personal safety while at work.
No one is going to be tracked or have their conversations recorded. There is going to be an immense amount of truly dull uneventful video, but hopefully when it is needed for evidence later it will be availble and of reasonable quality. Currently CCTV is in use on SkyTrain. The tape is rewound every hour, automatically, because of the limitations of old fashioned storage methods, so often key evidence is inadvertently wiped.
I think Mr Pask is being paranoid. But I also think that enough incidents have happened that it is overdue that the system take note and respond. Taxi drivers were being assaulted at work until the taxi companies installed cameras. The assaults stopped. Just as bait cars have cut auto theft.
If you don’t want to be recorded, then you don’t have to use the system. The people who do use the system, and who work on it, will be safer once the cameras are installed. You have no expectation of privacy on public transport, and the only people who benefit from not being recorded are those with something to hide. On the bus or the SkyTrain you are in a public place and being observed by other passengers. And many of them these days are carrying cell phones, cameras and other equipment capable of surveillance use. You may already be being followed and recorded and you have no idea who is doing it. And I am not talking about spy satellites either.
The way to prevent a police state is to have adequate oversight of the police by our elected representatives, and an investigation system whereby the police are subject to investigation by an independent, non-police authority.
Fare evasion
There was a piece last night on the CBC six o’clock tv news on the extension of the fare paid zone to buses on Monday. It does not seem to be on their web page so I am going to have to rely on memory.
(But, usefully, there are a few facts and figures from CKNW who ran a similar story)
The reporter, of course, started off with the usual line that SkyTrain loses millions of dollars every year to fare evasion. There was no attempt to put this into context. If you talk about fare evasion in terms of percentage loss (the way all retailers look at “shrinkage”) and compare that with the cost of increased enforcement, then you have to think about it as a business decision, not a simple “right or wrong” story. Or rather “we wuz robbed” - because of course it is the people who pay the fares and the taxes who pick up the tab for the free riders.
The library has the same magnetic tag alarm system that many shops use. And in both cases, the alarm goes off all the time and nothing happens. I have even had to take back a DVD that had been rendered completely unplayable by the library gluing metal tapes to the playing surface (it was a 2 sided DVD so you could still watch the “special features” just not the movie). Most people in the retail business recognize that they need to keep shrinkage down if they can but they do not want to upset their customers needlessly. And that is what happens when security overrides common sense. As it currently does in airline travel.
The new system on the buses is supposed to reduce the risk of drivers being assaulted. Disputes over the fare being one of the commonest triggers for an assault. And the drivers did not like the idea of reducing assaults by the use of cameras, even though that technology has eliminated assaults on taxi drivers who ran much higher risks.
At this point they trotted out spokesperson Ken Hardie, who did his best, but succeeded in explaining how not only to avoid paying the fare but also how to avoid paying the penalty as well. (Since he used to work for the Vancouver Police you would have thought he would know better.) The problem is that there is no way for the Translink Police to determine if the name and address they are being given when they hand out a ticket is genuine. So when the fine is unpaid it gets handed to a collection agency which usually gives up pretty quickly. Even when the fine is paid (which is very rare), Translink doesn’t get the money, the province does. So there really is not much incentive for them to push harder. And there are a growing number of people (Ken termed them “frequent flyers”) who have worked that out and never pay a fare or a fine.
This is not a new problem. It has been experienced elsewhere, and it is pointless looking at transit systems in Europe that use proof of payment since their legal system is quite different. Code Napoleon reverses the burden of proof and requires all citizens to carry an official identification document.
So let’s look at what happens at systems that use the British legal structure like we do. In London, no one ever paid parking tickets, because the court system was overburdened. Parking rule enforcement collapsed. Wheel clamping was introduced to make the penalty of delay bite hard and immediately on the offender. And it worked. Fare evasion on the London Underground ballooned as the automatic barriers which read the tickets were only installed in the Central Area as an economy measure. Introducing lower fares and zone fares helped a bit, but until barriers could be installed at all stations, there was a gaping hole. And even then, people worked out that all they needed was a ticket that opened the gates they would pass through, not one that necessarily allowed them to travel the entire route. We called it “dumbell fraud”. But it was the use of that second word that inspired the most effective response to the “frequent flyers”. Instead of issuing a penalty ticket, the regulars would be asked to accompany the officer to the police station. An investigation would then start to establish a pattern of activity. At which point the offender would not be issued a ticket but would be charged with a very serious offence - fraud. Because there would now be evidence that this individual rode free or at reduced fares on regular basis. And over the time of these repeated offences, a large sum had been diverted away from the transport system.
Many of the people caught in London turned out to be respectable citizens, with good jobs, often in financial institutions. One of them was even one of my bosses, who when he learned how easy it was to defraud the system, could not resist trying it himself. And the slogan that we came up with for this new enforcement program was “get a ticket, not a criminal record”. Because people who work in positions of trust have a lot more to lose than a few pounds - or dollars.
I would like to say that the program was as effective as wheel clamping, but that is not the case. It still requires regular enforcement and reminders: a few high profile cases every so often, which are given publicity, something that we had formerly been reluctant to do, since the people in the public gallery love to find out new ways to beat the system. Therefore deals for guilty pleas were quite common as it reduced the amount of evidence that had to be given out in public.
The parking problem and fare evasion problem have one feature in common. They extended the range of criminal activity from a smallish minority to a larger segment of the population. The extent to which we are honest is not absolute. Most people comply with the rules and regulations, most of the time, because we see the necessity of them. When these rules are openly flouted, and we see no penalty attaching to the offenders, our assessment of the risk of getting caught changes. And when there is a risk of getting caught but paying no penalty at all, then the percentage of people willing to try to get away with something starts to rise. The job of law enforcement is to keep that line where it is or push it back a bit. What has happened is that instead of a small percentage of generally criminal individuals ripping off the system, more people are now seeing that they can get away with not paying. And they spread that message.
As has the CBC, with this story. Thanks a lot.
Translink of course knows all about what I have written. And they will say that London is different and that wouldn’t work here. But the idea of continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different outcome is a useful working definition of madness.
Oh, one other thing I meant to mention. The CBC also dug out Rom Stromberg. He used to work for Transit, and told them what would happen if they went for proof payment on SkyTrain. But of course, as usual, they were trying to save money on the stations, and if they had had barriers, they would have had to have much bigger entrances and exits to allow for emergency evacuations. While the barriers are not cheap, it was the cost of these additional exits that killed the idea of barriers. Plus the fact that they would need to be manned all the time at every station in case they stopped working or someone with a pram or a wheelchair needed to be let through. Like I said, fare enforcement is not about morality, it is about economics. And the people who do not pay their fares are behaving with perfect economic rationality.
