Blue and red flashing lights, uniformed officers and an explosives detection dog are usually signs that a major incident is happening in East Vancouver.\u00a0 But on Sunday, these were part of the draw to Cops, Kids & Woodland Park, a family-friendly event put on by the Grandview-Woodlands Community Policing Centre.<\/p>\n
Some East Vancouver communities have a rocky relationship with the Vancouver Police Department, with distrust being a fairly common sentiment in the area.\u00a0 For Adrian Archambault, coordinator for community policing with the centre, the point of Sunday\u2019s event was outreach to the community\u2019s youngest members and their families.\u00a0 The goal of community policing, according to Archambault, is to provide a bridge between the police and the people who live in the neighbourhood.<\/p>\n
The annual event is usually held in Grandview Park, but moved to Woodland Park this year because of Grandview\u2019s closure in August.\u00a0 Archambault hopes that the event will encourage families to make more use of Woodland Park, which is located just off the Adanac bike route.<\/p>\n
The theme for the day was back-to-school safety, with 50 volunteers on hand to help with child identification, bike safety and face painting.\u00a0 Prabhjot Sandhar, 15, has been volunteering at events like these for the last three years.\u00a0 She helps out at the community policing centre because she wants to become a police officer.<\/p>\n
The flashing lights of a fire truck proved to be one of the day\u2019s major draws, as children were given the opportunity to clamber into the cab for a photo.\u00a0 A small crowd also formed around two-year-old Bailey, a black Labrador eager for pats from the gathered children.\u00a0 Handler Constable John Alleman of the transit police explained Bailey\u2019s role as an explosives detection dog working mostly in the Skytrain system.\u00a0 Alleman tries to bring Bailey out to community events as much as possible.\u00a0 \u201cPolice don\u2019t solve crime on their own,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Tim Smatlan is a young father who lives around the corner from Woodland Park. \u00a0He brought his daughter Violet to the event after hearing about it from a neighbour. \u00a0Asked about her favourite part of the day, four and a half year old Violet proudly showed off a blue butterfly drawn like a mask over her eyes. \u00a0“Face painting!” she said between bites of hot dog smothered in ketchup.<\/p>\n
The event seemed successful, with a few hundred people taking part in the day\u2019s various activities.\u00a0 But just three blocks away, fresh-looking graffiti painted a different picture of East Vancouver.\u00a0 \u201cDead copz,\u201d read a tag in vibrant green lettering on a mural near Britannia high school.\u00a0 Despite events like Cops, Kids and Woodland Park, tensions between some members of the community and police still exist in this area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Blue and red flashing lights, uniformed officers and an explosives detection dog are usually signs that a major incident is happening in East Vancouver.\u00a0 But on Sunday, these were part of the draw to Cops, Kids & Woodland Park, a family-friendly event put on by the Grandview-Woodlands Community Policing Centre. Some East Vancouver communities have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3524,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37824],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vancouver-east"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3524"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1387,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions\/1387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/thunderblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}