A Public Education Campaign to Decrease Violence Against the LGTB Community

Sponsoring Member: Insp. John De Haas

The Stop the Violence program, working in partnership with Vancouver’s LGBT Centre, is a multi-faceted initiative that will assist the VPD in their efforts to decrease bias, prejudice and hate motivated offences at members of the Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Bi Sexual (LGTB) Communities. It is hoped that this will send an effective message to the general public that hate-motivated violence will not be tolerated. The Stop the Violence program aims to enable the LGTB community to step forward more confidently to reports incidents of violence, with a long-term outlook of decreasing violence perpetrated against community members. The initiative hopes to prove more strongly that the VPD takes these offences seriously and wants to have everyone support our common goals of creating a safer city and fostering respectful relations between all community members.

Comments from Insp. John De Haas

“We will be running another round of information tent cards this summer [2010] with updated information and to renew the call to the public, most specifically LGTB communities to stay vigilant on reporting. [The cards] were very successful last year with over 3,000 being handed out. The Hate Crimes Unit did see an increase in reporting, however, we cannot directly attribute that to the information cards. Rather, we see it as a compilation of our activities, from the original forums two years ago, including the tent cards and continuous efforts on the part of the Diversity Section and Qmunity to raise awareness and educate these communities and the general public. Funding has been applied for from the EmbraceBC fund through the provincial government to complete the entire campaign. If funding is successful a full evaluation will be completed on all initiatives since initial funding was garnered.”