Crime and violence crush the vulnerable as pandemic pushes us to the tipping point
A body found at a homeless camp on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. That's how it was reported: a body.
That “body” was a person. Troubled, no doubt. Addicted, maybe. But also almost certainly cold, wet, hungry, tired and scared by living rough.
The unidentified man was also, surely, someone's son, friend. But the only thing that made this man's individual tragedy newsworthy is that he died at the confluence of decades of failed public policy.
Had he overdosed at home or even at the corner of Main and Hastings, he would have been part of a grim but faceless statistic. Five British Columbians die of an overdose every day now.
Only a few blocks from the squalid camp there is a “missing person” poster taped to a wall. Chelsea Poorman, 24, was last seen on Sept. 7 on Granville Street near Davie.
“I watched this young girl arrive, struggle with addiction, and then apparently disappear,” Craig Bell told me. He has lived in the Downtown Eastside for years, but has never seen it so awful.
Like so many women who have disappeared and so many who are homeless in Vancouver and the rest of Canada, Poorman is Indigenous, and one of three Indigenous women reported missing from downtown in the past five years.
“In general, it's normalized to see violence happening and not do anything about it,” Andrea Glickman of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs told me. “And women are always at greater risk of violence because their vulnerabilities are exacerbated by systemic issues of racism, poverty and colonialism.”
It has been well-documented at the National Inquiry into Miss
ing and Murdered Indigenous Women, the B.C. Missing Women Inquiry and more recently in the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre report entitled Red Women Rising. All come with pages and pages of recommendations.
“How many people have to die?” It's a question that's long been asked about our various overlapping crises — homelessness, addictions, mental health, gendered violence, and systemic racism.
It's possible that COVID has finally pushed us to the tipping point.
The pandemic has worsened all the other crises. Critical services have been closed or reduced for the protection of workers as well as users.
Community centres, libraries, counselling services and other safe, warm and dry places where homeless people can spend days inside have restricted access.
Social distancing makes shelter beds scarce and affordable housing scarcer.
Desperation has increased the level of violence, with a rising number of unprovoked assaults and stabbings. It's been especially hard on women as gendered violence has risen sharply, regardless of whether the women are middle-class and housed or living on the streets at a time when transition houses and safe houses are under strict COVID protocols.
If the food lines are long outside your local grocery store, they are much longer at food banks and soup kitchens.
Overdose deaths have hit new highs. Fires and violence are being reported at homeless camps in all sizes of cities across the country.
And this week, infectious diseases specialist Dr. Carl Boodman reported that trench fever — a disease common during the First World War and known to infect people in crowded refugee camps — has been found among the homeless in Winnipeg. So where is the humanity? Perhaps surprisingly, you hear it from people at or near the front lines. People such as Strathcona residents with homes. They don't want people living in the park because nobody should have to live in a park.
They are horrified by what many described as the inevitability of that man's death after another man was stabbed there in October and left for up to eight hours before paramedics were called. Another was assaulted in September and left in serious condition for up to 12 hours before getting help. No witnesses have come forward.
Still, Strathcona residents are pleading for compassionate solutions for the homeless among them.
Sophie Shaddock- Good is a lifetime resident of Strathcona, which she describes as a special place — a small town in a big city where people look out for each other.
The camp didn't change that. What did change is that residents are now afraid to walk around their own neighbourhood.
“We elect officials to deal with the problems that we cannot deal with at the civilian level,” Shaddock- Good wrote in an email to a long list of politicians and copied to me. “We are helpless and it feels as though we are yelling into the void. Nobody is really acting, nothing is being done
... I am begging for, at the very least, you all to figure out whose responsibility this is, and if that isn't clear then it needs to be assigned to someone/a group of someones.”
Mira Malatestinic lives a block from the park.
“Right now, we're treating these people like garbage,” she wrote to a similar long list of politicians copied to me. “Right now is when you can change this situation. Let's change all of this tomorrow!!”
Jennifer Johnson is in the hope and humanity business as CEO of the 113-year-old Central City Foundation. Even she admits that things have never been worse.
“Absolutely, there needs to be leadership at all levels of government for a co-ordinated action plan,” she said.
It has taken years to get to this sad pass. Unwinding decades of piecemeal, unco-ordinated and underfunded responses won't be quick.
But one thing is certain: It needs political courage, compassion and lots of cold hard cash — strategically allocated and carefully audited — to solve it.