BURST
Vancouver police are telling voters crime is down. The timing is raising eyebrows.
With early ballots already being cast in the city’s municipal election, the Vancouver Police Department called a news conference Thursday to deliver a positive message about public safety: some serious crimes are falling , and the department credits years of increasing police investments for the change.
But Stewart Prest, a political science lecturer at the University of B.C., said the police department’s decision to make the announcement now is “problematic.”
“It’s even more significant when it happens during an election,” Prest said. “But it’s always something potentially problematic when police are effectively making the case for an expanded police budget.”
The Vancouver Police Department rejected the suggestion that Thursday’s news conference was timed for the election.
“It’s not something we’re just doing because of an election. (Crime statistics) are pushed up monthly,” said Senior Deputy Chief Const. Howard Chow.
“I’m up here to talk about our crime, our data, what’s happening in the City of Vancouver, and send everybody home with a message that Vancouver is safer now than it has ever been.”
Vancouver police say the city’s overall “crime severity index” hit a record low in 2025, marking its lowest level since Statistics Canada began tracking the measure in 1998.
The index, which weighs crimes by their severity rather than treating offences such as shoplifting and violent robbery equally, fell 22.3 per cent in Vancouver over the past decade, according to the police department.
The city’s non-violent crime severity score also reached a record low last year. Its violent crime score did not, which the department attributed to murder charges stemming from the Lapu-Lapu Day attack.
Chow acknowledged crime in Vancouver is up so far in 2026 compared with the same period last year, but said several serious offences, including murder, attempted murder, sexual offences, break-and-enters and auto theft , are declining.
The department projects all three crime severity indexes will reach record lows by the end of 2026.
“We are making progress. It’s not an accident. It’s not a coincidence. It’s because the Vancouver Police Department is policing effectively and investing in the right technologies and policing strategies like Project Barrage and the creation of District 5 to address public safety concerns,” Chow said.
Those investments have been championed by Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC Vancouver party, which has made public safety one of its core commitments in its re-election campaign.
ABC has pointed to increased police funding, Project Barrage and the creation of District 5 as evidence of its record on public safety.
“Under Mayor Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver, the city has fully funded both the Vancouver Police Department and Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services for the first time in decades,” the party’s website reads, linking increased police investment to a decline in violent crime in the Downtown Eastside, Gastown, Chinatown and Strathcona.
The Vancouver Police Department’s net operating budget rose from $344.7 million in 2022 to about $497.1 million in 2026. In 2025, council approved $5 million in one-time funding for Task Force Barrage, which targets violent offenders, organized crime and street disorder in the Downtown Eastside. In 2026, council approved another $2.8 million for District 5, a new policing district covering the Downtown Eastside, Gastown, Hastings Crossing and Chinatown.
Green party mayoral candidate Pete Fry, a sitting city councillor, said the increase in police spending has come with trade-offs, including cuts to other municipal services that also affect public safety.
“We’ve seen cuts to things like sex-worker safety equity. We’ve seen cuts to intimate-partner violence programs. We’ve seen cuts to community services,” Fry told Postmedia on Thursday.
Prest said the issue goes beyond the timing of Thursday’s announcement. By publicly making the case for police funding, he said, the police department risks stepping into a political debate that should be led by elected officials.
“It turns around the lines of accountability, where it gives the police an ability to hold politicians to account as opposed to having politicians, through the police board, and through the province and through the city council through budgets, deciding what the policing priorities of the city ought to be.”
Police have traditionally been expected to remain politically neutral as institutions, Prest said, while individual officers are free to participate in politics or run for office.
“The police should not be directing politicians. And that’s what this amounts to — an attempt to try to influence political decision-making.”
Prest also questioned whether Vancouver’s declining crime can be attributed primarily to local policing investments, noting that crime rates have fallen across Canada and elsewhere for more than a generation.
“So, it’s a very selective framing that tends to be quick and convenient for an argument that a certain element of the civil service wants to make.”
The debate over the use of crime statistics comes against a backdrop of ties between ABC and the Vancouver Police Union.
In the months leading up to the 2022 municipal election, the Vancouver Police Department issued a series of news releases highlighting seemingly random or unprovoked attacks, including several stranger assaults.
The releases came during an ABC party campaign in which public safety was becoming a major political issue. That year also marked a significant break from tradition for the Vancouver Police Union, which endorsed a mayoral candidate — Ken Sim — for the first time in its history.
On Oct. 5, 2022, the union endorsed Sim for mayor and urged voters to elect an ABC majority, saying public safety was “the number one issue” in that year’s civic election and that electing Sim and an ABC majority would ensure police and other front-line responders had the resources they needed.
Sim went on to win the mayor’s race, and ABC won a majority on council.
This election, the Vancouver Police Union is making public safety a focus, circulating a questionnaire to major parties asking them to “explain how they would build on Vancouver’s recent progress, support front-line policing, and address the public-safety challenges facing the city.”
“When people do not feel safe, every other municipal priority becomes harder to achieve. That is why the (Vancouver Police Union) will be active in this campaign and why parties should be clear about their plans,” union president Jason Chan said in a news release last month.
The relationship between ABC and the Vancouver Police Union has stretched beyond political endorsements.
Ralph Kaisers, the union’s former longtime president, ran unsuccessfully for ABC in a 2025 city council by-election after 34 years as a Vancouver police officer.
Former officer Brian Montague also ran for ABC in 2022 after nearly three decades with the department. Montague currently sits on council under the ABC party banner.