At the first meeting of
Vancouver City Council, Vancouver's first police officer, Chief Constable John Stewart, was appointed on May 10, 1886. On June 14, 1886, the morning after the
Great Fire of 1886,
Mayor McLean appointed Jackson Abray, V.W. Haywood, and John McLaren as
special constables. With uniforms from
Seattle and badges fashioned from
American coins, this four man team became Vancouver's first police department based out of the City Hall tent at the foot of Carrall Street. These four were replaced in 1887 by special constables sent by the provincial government in
Victoria for not keeping the peace during the anti-Asian unrest of that year. The strength of the force increased from four to fourteen as a result. razed the city By 1904, the department had grown to 31 members and occupied a new police building at 200 Cordova Street. In 1912, Vancouver's first two women were taken on the force as matrons. With the amalgamation of
Point Grey and South Vancouver with Vancouver in 1929, the department absorbed the two smaller police forces under the direction of Chief Constable W.J. Bingham, a former district supervisor with the
Metropolitan Police in London. By the 1940s the department had grown to 570 members. In 1912, L.D. Harris and Minnie Miller were hired as the first two policewomen in Canada. In 1917, Chief Constable McLennan was killed in the line of duty in a shoot-out in Vancouver's East End. Responding to a call by a landlord attempting to evict a tenant, the police were met by gunfire. Along with McLennan, the shooter was killed in the battle, as was a nine-year-old boy in the vicinity at Georgia and Jackson streets, which is now marked by a mosaic memorial. A detective who lost an eye in the shootout, John Cameron, later became the chief constable of the
New Westminster Police Department before taking the top job of the Vancouver force, which he occupied from 1933 to the end of 1934. Another member of the force was killed in the line of duty in 1922. Twenty-three-year-old constable,
Robert McBeath, was shot by a man stopped for impaired driving. McBeath had received the
Victoria Cross for "most conspicuous bravery" at the
Battle of Cambrai in France in the
First World War. McBeath's killer, Fred Deal, was initially sentenced to death, but won an appeal reducing it to life in prison because he had been beaten while in custody. The marine squad's boat, the
R.G. McBeath VC, was commissioned in 1995 and named in honour of McBeath. Plans for a new police building at 312 Main Street began in 1953. The Oakridge police station opened in 1961. A police memorial at 325 Main St. is dedicated to the Vancouver Police Department members who died in the First and Second world wars and lists the Vancouver Police Department members killed in the line of duty in Vancouver. In 1935, under Chief Constable
W. W. Foster, the Vancouver Police Department was complemented with hundreds of
special constables because of a waterfront strike led by
communists, which culminated in the
Battle of Ballantyne Pier, a riot that broke out when demonstrators attempted to march to the docks to confront
strikebreakers. Also that year, nearly 2,000 unemployed men from the federal relief camps scattered throughout the province flocked to Vancouver to protest camp conditions. After two months of incessant demonstrations, the
camp strikers left Vancouver and began the
On-to-Ottawa Trek. The Vancouver Police were at the centre of one of the biggest scandals in the city's history in 1955. Feeling frustrated that blatant police corruption was being ignored by the local media, a reporter for the
Vancouver Daily Province switched to a Toronto-based tabloid,
Flash. He wrote a sensational article alleging corruption at the highest levels of the police department in Vancouver, specifically, that a pay-off system had been implemented whereby gambling operations that paid the police were left alone and those that did not were harassed. After the
Flash article appeared in Vancouver, the allegations could no longer be ignored, and a
Royal Commission, the Tupper Commission, was struck to hold a public inquiry. Chief Constable Walter Mulligan fled to the United States, another officer from the upper ranks committed suicide, and still another attempted suicide rather than face the inquiry. Other scandals and public inquiries plagued the force before and since this one, dubbed the "Mulligan Affair", but none were so dramatic. An earlier inquiry into corruption in 1928 was ambiguous in its conclusions as to the extent of the problem. The last major inquiry into policing in Vancouver focused largely on police accountability. Judge
Wally Oppal (later provincial
attorney general), submitted the results of his report in 1994 in a four volume package entitled
Closing the Gap: Policing and the Community. Leonard Hogue, a constable in the police department, was the perpetrator in the
1965 Coquitlam Massacre. In 2009, the RCMP "E" Division joined forces with VPD to operate the
Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET)—Vancouver, operating out of VPD facilities instead of the INSET-BC Surrey operation base. outside
Buckingham Palace, June 2014 ==Community policing centres==