Following an order from the Human Rights Commissioner of B.C., the Victoria Police Department has shared its use of force data over six years, with an emphasis on race-based data associated with incidents where force was used.

VicPD defines use of force as any soft physical control that causes injury to the person or the officer, any hard physical control, intermediate weapon display or discharge B´ÎÔª¹ÙÍøÍøÖ·“ like baton, aerosols or tasers B´ÎÔª¹ÙÍøÍøÖ·“ display or drawing of a firearm, discharge of a firearm, police dog bites, use of specialty munitions and/or use of weapons of opportunity.

"In accordance with the VicPD Use of Force training and policy, officers use crisis intervention and de-escalation techniques prior to and/or in conjunction with the application of force," noted a release from VicPD. "Use of force is usually reported in the format of subject behaviour, officer response and recorded as a report by each officer involved in an incident."

In total, between 2018 and 2023, VicPD used force in a total of 1,685 incidents, or about 0.6 per cent of all 265,085 calls for service. In average, the department sees about 280 use-of-force incidents every year. The 216 incidents involving use of force in 2023 was the lowest total over the six-year period, representing a 31.4 per cent decrease from the 315 incidents in 2019.

Relating to race-focused data, Caucasian people represented about 74 per cent of use of force incidents while Indigenous people represented about 17 per cent of use of force incidents despite representing about five per cent of the city's population as of the 2021 Statistics Canada census.

The overrepresentation of Indigenous people being met with use of force is "reflective of the justice system overall, and the over-representation of Indigenous persons in other areas, such as the unhoused population, and does not indicate a choice to use force on one specific ethnicity over another," noted the VicPD release.

VicPD says their officers receive specific training on racial bias and they participate in "ongoing opportunities to better understand the historic and current impacts of colonization on the Indigenous community."

Within the six-year time span, a total of 56 incidents, or about three per cent, involved youth. Of those, about a quarter involved non-Caucasian youth, which is in-line with the rest of the data.

The release of the data was a result of a 2024 inquiry into the use of police force from the Office of the B.C. Human Rights Commissioner.