Ken Sim Is Taking Credit for Lower Crime Rates

On Sept. 9, incumbent majority party ABC Vancouver opened their civic election campaign by dropping three ads on YouTube.

Two of the three focused on Green Party of Vancouver Coun. Pete Fry’s public safety voting record.

At the same time, ABC credited themselves for the recent decrease in violent crimes reported in Vancouver.

Fry is one of five candidates currently running to unseat incumbent ABC Mayor Ken Sim, who is seeking a second term in office.

In 2022, ABC won the election with a majority on council, the school board and the park board. Since then, five elected ABC members have left or were kicked out of the party, meaning the party currently only has a majority on council.

Recent voter polling shows Fry is more popular with decided voters than Sim.

Fry is also now the only progressive party candidate left in Vancouver’s mayoral race, after William Azaroff of OneCity Vancouver and Stephanie Allen of COPE ended their mayoral campaigns earlier this month.

ABC Coun. Peter Meiszner says it’s Fry’s public safety record, not his polling numbers, that led to ABC’s focus on him.

“It’s really to highlight his voting record on council,” Meiszner told The Tyee, adding the ABC majority council has “put a lot of efforts and resources towards public safety in the city.”

The narrator of one ABC ad says, “In the middle of a massive public safety crisis, Pete Fry cut millions of dollars from the Vancouver Police budget.”

Grainy footage of Fry speaking in council, as well as blurred faces of people committing assault and being arrested, flash across the screen as ominous music plays in the background.

The other video ad intersperses grainy clips of Fry with images of street encampments, and people with blurred faces being arrested, sitting on sidewalks or committing assault, with clips of a green park, a running toddler and the ABC councillors, Mayor Sim and Vancouver Police Chief Steve Rai opening the new Woodwards police training centre earlier this year.

“Task Force Barrage tackled organized crime, violence and street disorder, and the new VPD training centre is bringing desperately needed change to the Downtown Eastside,” the narrator says, alleging Fry voted against against Task Force Barrage, a $5 million boost to police presence in the city’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.

But that’s not true, Fry told The Tyee in a recent interview, because Vancouver city council wasn’t given opportunity to vote on Task Force Barrage.

However, council did vote on whether or not to provide $5 million in funding for the task force in November 2025, nine months after the initially six-month task force started up. Fry, along with COPE Coun. Sean Orr and OneCity Vancouver Coun. Lucy Maloney, did vote against providing the $5 million, but were outvoted by their ABC council colleagues and then-independent Coun. Rebecca Bligh.

The attack on Fry’s record comes seven months after Sim and ABC Coun. Lenny Zhou were caught telling Chinese language news media that COPE Coun. Sean Orr had distributed illegal drugs in public on Christmas Day 2025. Zhou repeated this accusation in Mandarin on Wechat, a social media site popular with Vancouver’s Chinese diaspora community.

Initially Sim let Zhou take the blame, before Canadian Press revealed the accusation originated with Sim. Orr, who categorically denies the accusation, is currently suing Sim for defamation. The ABC majority council also declined to sanction Sim this past spring after the city’s integrity commissioner determined Sim had harassed Orr on other occasions.

Sim, Zhou and Orr are currently seeking re-election.

Overall ABC’s ads critiquing him are misleading, Fry told The Tyee.

“They’ve conflated a lot of material into a narrative that they’re trying to suggest that I’m somehow against public safety,” said Fry.

Fry told The Tyee that he supports police, but sees them as just one element for improving public safety.

“We talk a lot about the integrity of the job and de-politicizing policing. Police have to be completely beyond reproach and we can’t have these backroom political antics,” he added.

The 2022 public safety election platform

This is not the first time ABC’s narrative about public safety has been called into question during election campaigning.

During the 2022 election, following an increase in assaults on strangers in public after the initial shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, ABC Vancouver ran on a platform promising to improve public safety. This included a pledge to hire an additional 100 mental health nurses and 100 police officers.

The Vancouver Police Union, which represents Vancouver police officers, endorsed ABC during that election campaign. It was the first time the union had endorsed a political party in a municipal election.

While the ABC-led council was eventually able to hire 100 police officers, they ran into complications hiring 100 nurses.

“What happened was funding was allocated to Vancouver Coastal Health to launch the program, and they came back to us and said, ‘Actually, we need around 40 to 50 mental health workers,’ and that’s what we funded,” Meiszner said.

Unbeknownst to the public until 2023 when the Vancouver Police Department finally released crime data CTV News had been asking for since before the election, random stranger attack reports had already begun to decrease before ABC was elected.

Four years later, violent crime is still on a downswing.

ABC Vancouver is taking the credit.

“I believe it was at a 23-year low last year,” Meiszner said, referring to violent crime rates.

But despite successes, including pressuring the federal government to introduce bail reforms to keep repeat offenders incarcerated before their day in court, Meiszner added that public safety remains a concern for residents.

Police budget arguments

ABC’s ads do not mention that the December 2020 council decision to freeze the police budget — which is in effect a cut when inflation is taken into account — was not solely Fry’s doing. However, of the five councillors and then-Mayor Kennedy Stewart who voted in favour of the budget cut, only Fry remains on council.

Council at that time had also voted to freeze hiring in several city departments in an effort to keep property tax increases at five percent for 2021. That’s lower than the ABC majority-led council’s first three property tax increases, which peaked at 10.3 per cent in 2023.

Sim’s ABC party finally delivered on its zero per cent property tax increase promise in the 2026 budget, despite significant community opposition.

Public safety issues were complex and affected by a number of intersecting factors in 2020. The ongoing COVID pandemic led to a surge in random physical attacks and overt racism against people of Asian descent.

That year also marked the start of a public reckoning over police violence, particularly against Black and Indigenous people. Statistics have shown B.C. has a particularly high rate of police-involved killings.

Ultimately, the provincial NDP government stepped in and overturned Vancouver council’s 2020 police funding freeze, sparking conversations about who controls police spending in B.C.

Since forming a majority on city council in 2022, ABC has continually approved budget increases for police.

Task Force Barrage’s $5 million budget came on top of the Vancouver Police Department’s overall $426 million 2025 budget. It was announced via a February press release and news conference featuring Sim, then-police chief Adam Palmer and ABC-affiliated councillors. Opposition city councillors, including Fry, found out about the task force plan at the same time as the public.

That’s part of why the task force was so controversial: non-ABC councillors and the Vancouver Police Board were left out of the funding decision for nine months, contrary to B.C. policing legislation.

The other part of the controversy revolved around whether the police-heavy response was even appropriate, given most experts say the root causes of safety issues in the Downtown Eastside are in fact ongoing overlapping health and socio-economic crises.

Doubling down on police as solution

Task Force Barrage was announced two years after the city ordered a controversial “street sweep” of homeless encampments in the neighbourhood, which ABC said was necessary because of safety concerns raised by police and the fire department. That street sweep cost the city approximately half a million dollars.

The city had previously promised neighbourhood residents and support services that they would not dismantle the camps until housing alternatives were secured. Services organizations who operate homeless shelters said camp residents were often not offered permanent housing.

Sim’s former chief of staff, Kareem Allam, criticized the decision to go ahead with the sweep without first securing housing or supportive services’ buy-in. Allam, who ran ABC’s 2022 election campaign, has since formed the Vancouver Liberals political party and is challenging Simfor the mayor’s seat.

Seven months after Task Force Barrage was announced, the Vancouver Police Department requested and received an additional $17 million in budget overrun funding from city council, in part due to a horrific vehicle attack at the Lapu-Lapu Day festival in 2025. The $5 million for Task Force Barrage was part of that funding total.

As well, despite a property tax freeze that resulted in $120 million in city budget cuts, including cuts to the city’s safety supports for sex workers, the Vancouver Police Department budget increased by 10 per cent to just under $500 million for 2026.

The ABC majority council also voted in favour of a new Vancouver police district and police training centre in the Woodwards Building in the Downtown Eastside. The training centre, which joins a community policing office in the building, followed the closure of the London Drugs location in the building earlier this year.

London Drugs cited repeat violence against staff, shoplifting losses, and a decrease in foot traffic to the area as reasons for the closure.

The ABC majority council approved a new police training centre for the vacant storefront despite objections from community members, the Justice Institute of BC — which is responsible for police training in B.C. — and the Hastings Crossing Business Improvement Association.

Plebiscite problems

Where ABC Vancouver, the Vancouver Police Department and the Vancouver Greens align is in acknowledging that ensuring safety in the city of Vancouver requires more than just a police response.

At a Sept. 16 residents forum hosted by Neighbours of 900 Helmcken, a group of business owners and residents opposed to the opening of a now-cancelled overdose prevention and safe consumption site, VPD Chief Rai emphasized police are out of their depth when it comes to preventative, rather than reactive, measures to health and poverty issues.

“Those that are in uniform, especially in policing where you’re carrying a firearm, shouldn’t be at the front end of leading what essentially is a health crisis. It’s a socio-economic crisis,” he said.

Fry agrees, which is why he introduced a motion to create regulations for overdose prevention, opioid substitute clinics and harm reduction sites in July.

“These are essential health-care services, but not all run in ways that are contributing thoughtfully to the betterment of the immediate community,” Fry said, citing the importance of standards for cleanliness, space for people to use safely indoors and clear sidewalks outside sites, among other basic standards.

ABC councillors subsequently amended Fry’s motion, including requiring sites to demonstrate that disorder isn’t increasing on neighbouring streets and neighbourhoods after a site’s opening.

Fry argues that the amended motion created standards for operation that are impossible to meet. In the end, he voted against his own motion.

The Greens’ platform

The Greens haven’t yet released a full platform. So far, they have promised more oversight and regulation of harm reduction and safe consumption sites, including connecting people to treatment and recovery.

They’ve also said they support fully funding restorative justice initiatives and having a community conversation about whether it is an appropriate alternative to police and criminal court responses for poverty and addiction-related crimes like shoplifting.

A Green majority council promises to end the pause on approving certain new supportive housing developments, and increase the number of shelter beds.

The Greens are also advocating for collaboration between city departments like police, fire, planning and licensing to provide a coordinated response to street-level homelessness, public drug use and violence related to mental health and substance use issues.

The party also wants to introduce peer support teams for responding to non-acute incidents, such as when a person is sleeping in a business’ doorway, experiencing mental health distress, or caught shoplifting. Residents and business owners alike complain that police response for these kinds of situations is inadequate, as they either do not respond or don’t respond fast enough.

ABC has also yet to release a full election platform. But over the summer they voted in favour of adding two plebiscite questions to the Oct. 17 ballot, asking residents if they supported the city cracking down on illegal drug consumption in public, and pushing the province to open involuntary care beds in the current St. Paul’s hospital site after the hospital relocates next year. The consumption of illicit drugs in public is already illegal.

Opposition councillors, including Fry, voted against the plebiscite and criticized it as a $500,000 campaign stunt.

At the Sept. 16 Neighbours of 900 Helmcken forum, which was not run by ABC but was promoted on the party’s mailing list, Sim called the plebiscite questions the most important election questions in Vancouver over the last 40 years.

Despite acknowledging earlier in the evening that police are not enough to respond to the issue, Sim added, “We are committed in the meantime on our end to fully investing in whatever the police need.”