The New Westminster Police Department will track violation tickets issued as part of its provincial reporting requirements.
At its April meeting, the police department sought direction from the New Westminster police board about annual reporting required under British Columbia Provincial Policing Standard (BCPPS) — Promoting Unbiased Policing. The BCPPS and the NWPD’s Unbiased Police policy require the police department to complete an analysis of at least one of the following types of records at least once a year, disaggregated by ethnicity, and gender or sex of subjects:
· Subject-behaviour‐officer‐response (SBOR) reports
· Prisoner booking records
· Other records as identified by the police board
A report to the board included a list of potential records that could be analyzed:
· Subject-behaviour-officer-response (SBOR) reports
· Prisoner booking records
· Persons coded as Charged or Recommended Charged in PRIME (an online database that includes information about criminals and crimes)
· Persons coded as Victim in PRIME
· Mental Health Act arrests
· Violation tickets issues
· Police applicants
· OPCC complaints
New Westminster Police Department Chief Const. Paul Hyland said staff recommend whatever data is collected should be gathered for a period time, such as three to five years, in order to determine trends.
“I think it would be beneficial if we gave the disaggregated data over a period of time, rather than just one year, like a moment in time,” he said. “Because what does that mean? You are not comparing it.”
Police board member Mary Trentadue agreed with the need to collect the data over a number of years but said she was unclear how the data would help the police board determine policy or support projects it wants to do.
“I’m just not sure what the big picture is around that other than the data, although I think the data would be very interesting,” she said.
Hyland said the data collection is a requirement from the province, so the first step would be to gather the data. He said the board could then determine how the data could be used.
“What we use this data for is for our discretion,” said Heather Boersma, vice-chair of the police board. “We just have to decide.”
Board members discussed a suggestion that the NWPD collect data about prisoner bookings for the past three years, noting it already has records for 2023 so staff would only have to go back two years to get a three-year data set.
Board member Patrick Lalonde recommended the department gather data about violation tickets, as it may shed light on tracking interactions with NWPD members and members of the public and what that looks like in terms of disaggregated information.
“There is a lot of discretion in traffic. There’s the initial stop and then the decisions that come afterwards,” he said. “So, if there are disparities in that kind of thing, I think it would be very illuminating, versus bookings.”
Hyland said more than 95 per cent of violation tickets issued by the NWPD would relate to traffic.
The police board unanimously supported a motion directing the police department to gather records about violation tickets.
“That it’s more of an upstream interaction that we’d be tracking and getting data on versus [prisoner] bookings, which is pretty much downstream,” said board member Stephen Macintyre. “All of the data would be interesting. I think it would be perhaps more informative to understand what’s happening upstream, the initial interactions.”
By Theresa McManus, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on May 08, 2026 at 12:00
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