Although it’s been slow in coming, charges related to the Stanley Cup riot will start to be laid by late October, with hundreds more after that, Vancouver’s chief of police said.
Chief Constable Jim Chu said charges can go ahead after the 1,600 hours of video captured during the riot is processed at the LEVA Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Lab in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the coming weeks.
The lab can process in two weeks what it would take the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) two years to process, said Insp. Les Yeo, who heads up the VPD’s riot investigation team.
“This is the only place in the world that can process that volume of evidence that quickly,” Yeo said, adding that 40 charges will be laid on Oct. 31 and “a lot more weekly after that.”
Chu said the goal is to lay more charges than were laid after the G20 riots in Toronto in June 2010. “They charged 317 people with riot-related charges, and we’re going to exceed that.”
He said he has alerted officials in the justice system to expect a large volume of cases.
“We’ve talked to prosecutors as well as senior officials in the judicial system and said ‘Get ready for the large number of cases that are going to come forward through the courts.’”
Although no one has been charged so far, 70 suspects have turned themselves in and 10 arrests have been made. Police expect that number to grow steadily as new photos are added to a special police website set up to identify riot suspects.
Chu praised officers for the way they handled themselves on the night of the riot and their restraint in dealing with the situation. He said many riots in Canada and other parts of the world result in complaints of police brutality and excessive force, while the VPD received just one complaint.
After the Toronto G20 weekend, more than 350 complaints were filed with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director related to allegations of police misconduct or violence.
Although the VPD was criticized over how it handled the mayhem, Chu said police managed to quash the riot in three hours, despite the fact that it was a much bigger riot than the Stanley Cup riot of 1994, which took seven hours to bring under control.
He also defended the length of time it has taken to lay charges, saying it was a complex investigation and police wanted to be sure they got it right so that nobody escaped justice.
“If you rush these you can see cases dropped,” he said. “We don’t want to lose a single case in court.”
Chu and Yeo made the comments at a virtual town hall that included an hour-long live webcast during which they answered random questions from the public.
Dubbed Tweet the Chief, it was a first-of-its-kind social media event for the VPD and something that has never been attempted by any police department in North America, according to Constable Lindsey Houghton.
