Vancouver riot report released
Posted Sep 1, 2011 04:14:13 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
An independent report says police were in a state of confusion and had lost control of the massive crowd hours before the start of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup Game 7 loss.
The report paints a frightening picture of a crowd ballooning out of control up to three hours before the puck dropped, with thousands of people unexpectedly packing the city’s downtown, many of them already fuelled with alcohol.
The independent review found the crowd was larger and arrived much earlier than city or police officials had anticipated and security efforts were overwhelmed, with one officer saying that some people who wanted to get away from the crushing crowd couldn’t.
Instead of being in control, police were forced to react to numerous reports of barricades being breached, people climbing telephone poles and being forced against barricades in the hours leading up to the game.
“At 7:46, a Twitter user with the handle Marimo tweets: ‘Get ready for a riot Vancouver.’ Bottles fly towards the blank screen, a planned post-game segment is cancelled to encourage the crowd to leave,” the report said.
The report’s two authors found that co-operation among the Vancouver Police Department and the RCMP had improved significantly since the 1994 riot in Vancouver, but there were still problems.
