Vancouver Police Chief Adam Palmer refused to confirm or deny that he plans to run for a seat in the next federal election when asked by reporters but promised to unveil his coming career move in the next week or so.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Vancouver’s police chief is retiring from the department he joined as a constable in 1987 and led for the past decade.
Chief Constable Adam Palmer announced Tuesday he is leaving the department five months before his current contract expires. He refused to confirm or deny that he plans to run for a seat in the next federal election when asked by reporters but promised to unveil his coming career move in the next week or so.
When he leaves the post in April, he said, his most senior deputy, Steve Rai, will become acting chief, as per convention.
Mayor Ken Sim, who is a member of the police board, thanked Chief Palmer for “being nice to the new kid” when he was elected just over two years ago and praised him for his tenure as the longest-serving chief of the department. The VPD has a draft budget of roughly $416-million this year or nearly 18 per cent of city hall’s $2.35-billion in expected expenditures.
Mr. Sim said the hiring committee he is chairing to find Chief Palmer’s replacement has already met a few times and plans to make its selection by the end of this year.
“With what’s going on in the world right now, budgets are going up everywhere in all departments in every single city and country,” Mr. Sim said.
Chief Palmer said he knows this committee is looking outside the Vancouver region for candidates, but pointed to nearby deputy chiefs Rai, Howard Chow and Fiona Wilson as each being more than qualified to assume his position.
Whoever takes over the job will have to contend with staffing challenges. Neither the mayor nor the chief could provide a figure Tuesday for how many of the 100 net new officers had been added since Mr. Sim was elected in October, 2022, on this central campaign pledge to improve public safety.
Last fall, Mr. Sim was publicly touting his accomplishment of this goal, but Statistics Canada data and internal Vancouver police staffing figures obtained by The Globe and Mail suggested Vancouver was just over one-third of the way there, while the VPD said 67 members had been added.
Chief Palmer said the department has helped reduce violent crime significantly over his tenure but called on higher levels of government to improve public safety by restricting bail for violent offenders and ramping up the involuntary treatment of people in places like the Red Fish Healing Centre for Mental Health and Addiction.
He touted his leadership through turbulent times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, recent tensions stoked by Israel’s war in Gaza and the racial reckoning brought on by the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and “all that nonsense about defund the police.”
Asked about his most difficult decision while head of the department, Chief Palmer pointed to fighting then-mayor Kennedy Stewart’s request to help the city trim its 2021 budget because of revenue shortfalls from the pandemic. He said he worked with the board to appeal to the province and eventually had the $5.7-million restored to the departmental budget.
“Of course when you do an appeal like that, it does create some acrimony amongst parties involved and that was a tense period of time,” he said, before adding it was also very difficult when officers got injured on the job, singling out a 2016 stabbing of an officer outside a Canadian Tire store.
Mr. Stewart, a former federal NDP MP and now a professor at Simon Fraser University, said this spat – over the amount the VPD budget would increase that year – was blown out of proportion amid a period of belt tightening across all city departments and pay cuts among staff, including himself. But, he said Tuesday, he has always respected Chief Palmer as a colleague.
“He’s a real credit to the uniform,” he said.
B.C. Premier David Eby wished Chief Palmer the best of luck in his next career and acknowledged how challenging a role it is to lead that department in a city like Vancouver.