Inquiry finds systems failed victims
VANCOUVER — Bias against the poor, drug-addicted sex workers in Vancouver’s troubled Downtown Eastside led to a series of failures that allowed serial killer Robert Pickton to spend years hunting his victims unimpeded by police, a public inquiry has found.
Commissioner Wally Oppal’s 1,448-page final report, released Monday, chronicles years of mistakes that allowed Pickton to lure dozens of women to his farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C., with little interference from police and even less concern from the public.
He noted that even referring to Pickton’s victims as missing women is a misnomer.
“The women didn’t go missing. They aren’t just absent, they didn’t just go away. They were taken.”
In a news conference interrupted by applause, jeers, drumming and aboriginal singing, Oppal appealed to the general public, asking people to imagine what life was like for Pickton’s victims and other women like them, even before they crossed paths with Pickton.
He said they were treated — in life and in death — as nobodies.
“I ask you to imagine how you would feel, put yourself in the shoes of one of the missing and murdered women and think how it would feel if you were dismissed, considered unworthy of attention by the majority of the people in your city.”
Oppal’s report found the problems with the investigation included structural ones — poor co-operation between Vancouver police and the RCMP, for example. But many were a result of something far more insidious and difficult to cure.
“Would the response of the Vancouver police and the public have been any different if these women had come from the west side of town? I think the answer is clear,” Oppal told The Canadian Press in an interview discussing his report’s conclusions said.
“There was an institutional, systemic bias against the women. ... They were poor, they were aboriginal, they were drug addicted and they were not taken seriously.”
Those biases were compounded by a lack of leadership among Vancouver police and the RCMP, he said.
Still, Oppal concluded the effects of that bias were not intentional, leading to systemic failures rather than a conscious decision to ignore Vancouver’s missing women.