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On a brisk afternoon on 14 April 2026, Tyson Singh Kelsall was walking to work in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside when he noticed five people lying sedated in a line along the sidewalk on Main Street. They must have used the same poisoned supply, he thought. For Singh Kelsall, who has spent years working in harm reduction in the neighbourhood, this sight was all too familiar as Vancouver’s drug supply is increasingly contaminated with sedatives like benzodiazepines.
But what he saw next made him stop. Arriving before an ambulance, Vancouver police worked their way down the row, yanking each person toward the building wall. None of the officers checked the people’s breathing or asked if they needed help. Once the people were dragged from the edge of the road, the officers left. Singh Kelsall trains people in overdose responses and knows that you should not roughly haul someone sedated by opioids mixed with benzos. You position them carefully, check their airway, and stay until help arrives.
“What do they think moving people just five feet will solve?” asked Singh Kelsall, researcher with Police Oversight With Evidence and Research (Power) – a community-based research project with Simon Fraser University. “Everyone knows that it’s not a preferable situation for people to be sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk. But this is putting people at risk of injury.”
Singh Kelsall and the team at Power have been documenting police interactions in the Downtown Eastside (DTES), one of Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods, since the project launched in July 2024. They hold weekly community drop-in sessions where residents can report instances of violence, aggression, or intimidation by law enforcement. And twice a week, trained members conduct observations in the neighbourhood and document their findings.
They monitor an area, less than a square kilometre, that has become the epicentre of the city’s housing, drug and mental health crisis, and which is located adjacent to BC Place, a host stadium at this summer’s World Cup.
Home to generations of low-income residents, an Indigenous population and people experiencing homelessness, DTES is one of the most overpoliced communities in Canada. A 2018 CBC investigation revealed that residents there had the highest fatality rate during police encounters of any city in Canada. Police practices in the area actively increase the risk of overdose, pushing people away from supervised consumption sites and into unsafe injecting environments, according to a study by the BC Centre of Substance Use.
But since the start of 2026, Power has documented an uptick in aggressive practices by law enforcement agencies in the city. Community members, civil society groups, and researchers blame the World Cup.
According to Kelsall, it is now routine for a team of several police officers, sometimes with city workers, bylaw officers, and occasionally a housing worker, to patrol the main corridor in the neighbourhood up to eight times a day. Power has documented cases of officers detaining and handcuffing people while searching their bags, threatening people with tickets for questioning why they were being held, and issuing $250 fines for smoking cigarettes.
This practice of imposing geographic restrictions on individuals to exclude them from a specific area is commonly referred to as “red-zoning,” according to Nicholas Blomley, professor of geography at Simon Fraser University.
“The net effect can be actually quite profound in terms of people’s wellbeing, people’s health, and ability to access vital resources, as well as community, including friends and partners,” he said.
For the World Cup, the city has allocated at least $242m from an estimated total budget of $685m to $729m for integrated public safety, traffic management, and stadium management. Deputy police chief Don Chapman expects it to be the city’s largest police deployment to date. The infrastructure required for such operations has been gradually enhanced over the past 16 months. In February 2025, Mayor Ken Sim announced Task Force Barrage, a $5m integrated deployment of police, firefighters, bylaw officers, and sanitation crews, billed as a crackdown on organized crime. This past January, the Vancouver Police Department rezoned to create District 5 – a brand-new policing district with 88 dedicated officers covering the DTES and its immediate surrounding neighbourhoods.
The city insists these decisions are unrelated to the World Cup, but for community members on the frontlines of the city’s policies, it is hard to parse the difference.
“I don’t know if it’s related to Fifa. But wanting residents to move just so other people can walk down the sidewalk. To me, that’s it,” said Kensall. “It’s linked to Task Force Barrage, District 5, trying to show visual impacts before the tournament.”
In April 2026, police issued a $1,000 street-vending ticket to a senior resident, weeks before formal restrictions went into effect. The new temporary bylaw, in effect from 13 May to 20 July to coincide with the World Cup, is designed, in part, to ensure Vancouver meets its “operations, safety, security, branding and brand protection obligations to Fifa,” which includes presenting a ‘clean and welcoming environment,‘ It gives the city expanded powers over street vending, noise, graffiti removal, and management of public space within two kilometres of the stadium.
“Now that Fifa’s coming, it’s like every time you turn a corner, there’s a cop jacking somebody up,” said Samona Marsh, a resident of DTES for more than 30 years and secretary of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and a community researcher at Power.
Marsh has watched the neighbourhood be “cleaned up” before, when the city hosted the Winter Olympics in 2010. Starting in 2008, Vancouver police conducted a ticketing blitz targeting bylaw infractions such as jaywalking, loitering, and street vending. They issued twice as many tickets as the previous year, 95% of which were issued within a four-block radius of the DTES. Residents who could not afford to pay the fines were further punished with arrest warrants and no-go orders that banned them from the neighbourhood.
Vancouver ran a similar play when it hosted the Expo in 1986, evicting more than a thousand low-income residents from their single-room-occupancy hotels. But in 40 years, the drug supply in the neighbourhood has drastically changed, meaning where you live and what you can access is not just a matter of convenience.
Since British Columbia declared a public health emergency in 2016, more than 18,000 people have died from toxic drugs across the province. The DTES recorded a death rate more than 12 times the provincial average in 2023 – the highest of any community in BC. The drug supply is no longer just fentanyl but laced with sedatives that require intervention on top of the standard naloxone treatment. Displacing the affected severs people from the peers who can help, from the harm reduction workers who know their names, or the supervised consumption site that could be the last line between them and dying alone.
“While displacement might have ruptured communities 30 years ago, now it can mean life or death,” said Singh Kelsall. “You displace someone to an unfamiliar area, and they could die.”
For those taken into custody, there is even more uncertainty. The BC supreme court chief said Fifa’s demand for police resources makes it nearly impossible to run normal court proceedings for almost a month. What happens to people ticketed, detained or arrested by the police when there are courts are limited in what they can do remains a mystery to Marsh.
“There’s going to be a whole lot of people that are either red-zoned or in jail,” she said. “Especially since there’s going to be no courts.”
VPD denied any change in its approach, saying that community concerns around displacement and policing style are “often without factual basis.”
“We are not changing our approach due to Fifa and are consistent in our interactions with the community,” said VPD in an email.
The department added that an increase in the total number of officers by 50% through Task Force Barrage and the new District 5 were necessary due to disproportionately high crime rates in the DTES.
“Task Force Barrage confirmed that high visibility policing has a positive effect on violent crime statistics and perceptions of public safety,” said VPD.
Sim has stated publicly that the displacement of unhoused people will not occur because of Fifa. When a motion was raised at city council about the security environment, former VPD spokesperson and city councillor Brian Montague characterized community concerns as “fear-mongering.”
But for Delilah Gregg, president of Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society and one of Power’s founding members, the question is about what comes after.
“Once the games are done, will we all of a sudden see less of them? Or will it stay the same?” said Gregg. She is a member of the Nak’azdli First Nation and a Carrier woman who has lived in the neighbourhood for decades, and has witnessed the impacts that increased police violence can have on people.
“I think for a lot of people, especially Indigenous people, having some cop tackling you down can be really harsh and jarring,” she said. It can trigger people who are still recovering from being forced into residential schools or involuntary treatment programs, she added. “They don’t realize how much trauma that is and how it can affect a person, especially when they’re not ready to.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Blomley, who did his research during the Olympics, but has seen the practice continue long after the torch was passed.
“It’s important to recognize that this is part of an ongoing process of criminalization and control,” he said. “When the football fans go away, the red zones will still be there, people’s stuff will still be being taken illegally from them.”
