The Vancouver Police Department's new administrative offices are pictured during the grand opening of the facility in Vancouver, B.C., on Jan. 24, 2012.Darryl Dyck for The Globe and Mail
Vancouver's new crime warehouse is a sleek, metal-clad building on False Creek Flats that looks like it was designed for a high-tech company.
But inside the Vancouver Police Department's forensic storage facility, it is clear this building was purpose-made for only one job: to help investigators catalogue and keep track of a massive amount of crime-scene evidence.
Ian Wightman, manager of the facility, which had its official opening Tuesday, said his staff had to move more than 400,000 pieces of existing evidence from the 59-year-old building on Main Street to the new one on Glen Drive.
"It took 28 days. And the big thing with evidence is that we have to maintain continuity so only my staff touches the evidence," Mr. Wightman said during a tour of the building. "It was shrink-wrapped, it was escorted by my staff, put into a truck, sealed in a truck, brought here, unloaded by my staff and brought in to the secure facility and closed off."
Starting with a homicide in 1926, the VPD has been holding evidence from serious crimes for 99 years. And with a steady flow of up to 300 new crime items coming in daily, the old building had become so crowded that exhibit boxes were being stacked up like items in a hoarder's basement.
The new 87,000-square-foot facility adds 65,000 sq. ft. of storage space. It has electronically controlled evidence lockers that slide back and forth like the automated shelves in a library; a rotating rack for up to 400 stolen bikes that operates like a giant dry cleaner's garment conveyor; and secure storage facilities for everything from the tiniest DNA sample to a full semitrailer truck.
"In the past when we had a long weekend we would come in to the old property office and evidence would be piled on top of evidence," Mr. Wightman said. "Now … there's nothing on the floor. Everything's been put away. Everything is nice and neat and tidy, so just from a police perspective this is 500-per-cent better than where we were before."
Mr. Wightman said the VPD looked at police facilities in Canada and the United States before designing the new $30-million building, which was jointly funded by the city, provincial and federal governments.
"I speak to policemen from around the world. Nobody has what we have," Mr. Wightman said during an interview in the inner sanctum of the building, where each door has an alarm, and 125 cameras record every movement. "I think LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department]has probably got a fairly fantastic building. Lots of smaller departments … have nice, clean facilities. But for the amount of evidence that we have, the number of policemen we have across the board, I don't personally think anybody has anything better than us.… I'll basically say we're in the top three."
Mr. Wightman, who has been handling forensic evidence for the VPD since 1986, said talk about a new property office began in 2003, and over the past four years it became the focus of a planning team. He said the new building is designed to have a "forensic tower" added on top later, and the long-term dream of the department is to have a facility that houses all forensic investigators under one roof.
The facility was one of two new VPD buildings opened Tuesday by Police Chief Jim Chu, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and Heritage Minister James Moore, the senior federal minister responsible for B.C. In addition to the crime warehouse, VPD also consolidated administrative and investigative offices in a new $15-million facility at 3585 Gravely St.
Police, Mr. Wightman said, are thrilled with the step forward they have made with the new storage building.
"We went from old technology that was there in the 70s to cutting-edge, right now, happening, clean, bright," he said. "People are incredibly happy about what we've got now."
Mark Hume