Maloney to force Ken Sim to keep promise to implement Peer Assisted Care Teams, and fight for crime-prevention services like supportive housing

VANCOUVER (Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Territories) - Lucy Maloney, OneCity Vancouver candidate, today committed to fighting for front-line safety and crime prevention services if elected to City Council. These services will fill gaps in our social safety net that are presently filled by the Vancouver Police Department (VPD).

“I live Downtown. It’s where my kids bike to school, take transit to see their friends, and hang out. I share people’s safety concerns, and am committed to act on them,” said Lucy Maloney, City Council candidate, OneCity Vancouver. “Ken Sim ran on a platform of balancing enforcement with prevention. Well, we’ve got the enforcement. But the prevention is nowhere to be seen. I’m going to fight to get those front-line safety and crime prevention services implemented.”

First on the list are Peer Assisted Care Teams (PACTs), an evidence-based community safety program that dispatches teams of trained civilian crisis-response workers to mental health and substance-use emergencies, where they work to de-escalate situations and connect people to support services. According to the Canadian Mental Health Association (BC), there are PACTs operational in North Vancouver, West Vancouver, New Westminster and Victoria.

First announced by OneCity Vancouver in September 2022, ABC Vancouver copied the promise in their platform. Despite this promise, PACTs remain unimplemented in Vancouver.

Maloney will also work with BC E-Comm to integrate non-police options into 911 emergency response - whether it is PACTs, or the psychiatric nurses working in the VPD dispatch centre. In 2024, Vancouver Coastal Health reported that the nurses in the dispatch centre had resolved 1,372 mental health emergency calls. Of those, 54% were either resolved by the nurse or diverted to ‘more appropriate’ healthcare-based responses, so that police were not needed.

Allowing trained healthcare workers in PACTs to respond to mental health and substance use emergencies will further strengthen this approach, better supporting community members and freeing up police resources, allowing them to focus on tackling violent crime.

“Right now, police are our default response to front-line health and social issues, whether it’s wellness checks, mental health or substance use crisis calls. They are responding to too many incidents that are more appropriately handled by mental health professionals and peer responders,” said Maloney. “PACTs are a way to handle these calls more efficiently and more effectively, so that people in crisis receive the support they need and that the police can focus on tackling guns, gangs and organized crime. I’m going to make Ken Sim keep his promise, and get them implemented.”

Maloney also pointed to Ken Sim’s promise to cancel all new supportive housing in Vancouver. In the landmark Vancouver At Home study, a Housing First approach - that is, quickly moving people into housing and then providing additional services and supports - showed significantly fewer criminal convictions and better health and social outcomes for community members compared to treatment as usual.

Everyone is safer when all community members receive the housing, health care, and social support they need. 

Sim’s promise to cancel supportive housing, together with his plan to ‘barrage’ the Downtown Eastside, announced to great anxiety and with no consultation with the impacted community, is creating a rift between the DTES community and Vancouver City Hall, ending crime prevention programs and endangering efforts to improve public safety for everyone.

These moves follow a broken promise to hire 100 nurses alongside 100 police officers. Instead, Vancouver got 200 police officers - and just 12 nurses. All reaction - and no prevention.

“We need to tackle public safety concerns in a way that builds trust,” concluded Maloney. “With his performative promises to ‘barrage’ poor neighbourhoods and cancel important services for marginalized people, Ken Sim has eroded trust and won’t make Vancouverites safer. He’s not working for you.”