A new report on the Lapu Lapu Day tragedy finds that the City of Vancouver's event safety rules are generally robust and were followed well on the day that 11 people were killed, but recommends better protocols for dealing with hostile vehicles.
The City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Police Department released the final joint report on Thursday, Sept 4, detailing the safety and event planning before and during the April 26 block party where an SUV was driven into a crowd, killing 11 people and injuring at least two dozen others.
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim said he hopes the release of the report would provide “a clearer sense of understanding and a road map for the future.”
The report has eight recommendations to improve safety at future outdoor special events. These include providing consistent direction on when and how to use barriers to block vehicles from areas where crowds are gathered.
Other recommendations include installing permanent vehicle-resistant infrastructure in public places, ensuring future major projects are assessed for hostile vehicle risks, updating the city's event policies to emphasize safety, standardizing safety planning, and expanding training and equipment use.
The report also recommends that more money be provided for these efforts, and for better coordination with provincial and federal authorities on event safety.
Some of these changes — such as the increased use of barricades — have already been implemented in the months since Lapu Lapu Day. Chief Const. Steve Rai of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) said the rest are being worked on.
“We've already implemented some of those changes, the city and the VPD together, and I expect those other recommendations to be implemented fairly quickly, at least as a chief I would expect before FIFA,” Rai said.
Sim made sure to point out that the changes are not in response to an increased threat level.
"We should be clear that these measures were about reassuring the public and increasing the collective sense of safety while at special events following the incident, not at a response to an increased risk to safety," he said.
Premier David Eby said he hoped this report would provide some insight into how the province can aide in preventing this from ever happening again.
“It's an issue being grappled with around the world and we're going to make sure that British Columbia is leading the way in terms of prevention and response,” he said.
This is the second major report to be released since the tragedy, with the first one commissioned by the provincial government to look not at this incident specifically, but at event safety as a whole.
This new report focuses much more the Lapu Lapu block party itself.
Officials noted that in the lead-up to the Lapu Lapu Day festival the event was designated low-risk based on information available at the time and resources were allocated accordingly.
“The intel was sound, the planning was sound,” Rai said. “We want to be fiscally responsible, and we don't want also police every event like a police state.”
Event planning cannot fix all the issues, mayor says
Doing more to secure and police events is only part of the solution to stopping these sorts of things from happening in the future, Sim says.
While he could non comment directly on the case of the individual charged for the killings, Sim said that more needs to be done to provide care for people with severe mental health care issues. He wants action on mental health at higher levels of government.
"Even if we were given a trillion dollars, we are not healthcare," he said. "So our hands are tied on this one. And so we are asking, we are begging, for action on this one."
B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad agreed with this sentiment, saying there is no question that security issues are at play, but that broader failures have led to these sorts of tragic events.
"The bigger issue, the bigger question, is mental health in British Columbia,” Rustad said. “Mental health services are severely lacking.”
