Deep in the bowels of the old West Vancouver Police Department building on Marine Drive, Const. Jeff Palmer cleans up some lunch garbage left behind by one of the last prisoners their jail cells will ever hold.
The last of the officers and civilian staff moved to their new building this week, a state-of-the-art 57,000-square-foot building adjoining the district’s municipal hall.
The change has brought with it 60 years of sorely needed updates in technology, psychology and even the philosophy of how a police station should look, feel, and operate.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the jail cells.
Gone are the cell doors with bars that slam shut. Instead, there are heavy solid doors with just a small viewing window. The main reason is privacy – not from the police or the jail guard, but privacy from each other.
The new design should cut down on the “verbal yapping” prisoners were known to engage in from time to time when they could see each other, Palmer said.
It also means that female prisoners or youth can be kept in a central area, whereas before, it was police policy to keep them in a separate area from adult men, making supervision much more challenging.
“It’s just much wiser,” Palmer said.
The North Vancouver RCMP detachment is almost 30 years old and it uses that same design.
Police are currently looking into whether the old cell doors can be auctioned off as a fundraiser.
Even the cell toilets have been replaced with “smart” toilets that are more resistant to tampering.
“On occasion, we’ll have prisoners who are in a cantankerous mood and they will stuff paper and start running the flusher until they flood the cells,” Palmer said.
For all of the updates in terminology and technology, the new building still has one cell labelled: Drunk Tank. Some things never change.
The way accused criminals get booked is new as well. No longer are their fingerprints taken with ink on paper. Now, they are done digitally and entered into a national database. This, too, is another area where West Vancouver has been lagging behind their peers.
The officers’ grievances with the old building are numerous and colourful. The boiler would break down in the winter and staff would sit at their desks, wearing parkas and toques. In the summer, the building roasted thanks to poor air circulation. Rats would get in walls and vents and die.
“In a rainstorm, this whole hallway would basically be lined with garbage cans because it leaks like a sieve,” Palmer said. “Two or three times in the last decade, the roof has substantially failed where all our detectives’ desks flooded with rainwater gushing in through a leaky roof.”
The move does have its sacrifices. West Vancouver constables are giving up their two-lane, underground gun range that offered a place for officers to get in some target practice while they were on duty. Health and environmental standards have changed since the gun range was built and West Vancouver police can still practise at a number of other police and private ranges around the Lower Mainland.
“It does require a lot of space and expense. There’s a lot of maintenance for it in terms of cleaning out the waste rounds,” Palmer said.
The chief constable perhaps had the most to lose in the move out of Ambleside.
“It’s a fantastic view I had in my office – 180 degrees of water,” said Len Goerke. “I’ve watched grey whales and killer whales from that window over the last couple years.”
But he’d still opt for his new view, which is of the West Vancouver Fire and Rescue station No. 1, mostly because he’s less likely to need his new neighbours’ services. The old building was constructed before seismic standards were in place. His office was cantilevered over the WVPD’s parking garage, the area of the building most likely to fail in the event of an earthquake.
“We will actually be able to go out and look after people as opposed to in the old building,” Goerke said. We would have been too busy looking after our own people who had been buried in a crumbled building.”
And unlike the Ambleside location, the new one will be fully accessible for people with mobility issues.
When they have their grand opening in October, the general public who aren’t arriving in the back of a squad car should notice a difference in tone when they enter the main atrium, Goerke said.
“What the public will mostly see is that, hopefully, it’s a little bit more of a comfortable space to be in and a little bit less institutional than the old space and a little bit more welcoming,” he said.
Both inside and outside, the 16th Street building is still looking like a construction site. In fact, if you were to get booked this week, you might be able to slip away undetected if you happen to be wearing a hard hat and reflective vest. But it is a fully operational police station.
The original building isn’t long for this world. Developer Grosvenor has already applied for the demolition permit, according to district staff, and it will eventually be home to part of the six-storey, 96-unit condo building.
The district is being compensated with $37 million for the land, plus community amenity contributions, which will go toward developing affordable housing.
The $36-million police building will be finished roughly on time and on budget.
Mayor Mike Smith remembers well the protracted fight to get the Grosvenor project and new police building approved but, he said, “We now have a first-class building for a first-class police force.”
“I’ve still got a few scars from getting that Grosvenor deal approved. That was a long dance,” he said. “But now, I think people are starting to realize it was worth the effort because the police building is a great space, which they badly needed. The old one was falling apart. The new one is state of the art ... and it provides municipal hall space to house people we currently have scattered all over the municipality. We’ll be a lot more efficient in our own operations and so will the police department. It’s certainly a good news story for our taxpayers.”
