Richmond News reader

Letters: Did Richmond RCMP consider impact of sex worker safety in recent sting?

A letter writer feels like society is reverting to the 1990s

Dear Editor,

Re: "Richmond police target, arrest people seeking sexual services online," March 17, 2026

When I first arrived in Vancouver, I had everything I owned on my back.

I had left Halifax and hitchhiked — walked — across the country to get here. When I arrived, I couldn’t find anywhere to work indoors. The people we stayed with at first were known to us, but it still became a situation of sex in trade for a place to stay.

That was the reality.

We eventually moved into the City Centre Motel on Main Street, where other sex workers were living, and we all worked on the street at 2nd Avenue and Main Street.

It was there I met a serial killer.

It was there my friend was murdered and mutilated in ways I cannot bear to describe.

I remember those days — and I remember the policing just as clearly.

Police would enforce against us as part of a regular routine: moving us along, down one block, down one block, down one block, and then back to the beginning. Never still. Never safe.

Police officers would pretend to be clients. I was busted that way. A retired chief constable from the Abbotsford Police Department played the role one night, and I still have the probation order from his performance — a document that criminalized a young woman just trying to pay for a room to sleep in for the night.

They also set female police officers out among us to bait sex buyers.

All of this is why the recent enforcement action by the BC RCMP Human Trafficking Unit and the Richmond RCMP feels so familiar.

I feel like we have come full circle.

It's 1990 all over again.

In spite of Parliamentary direction. In spite of public policy commitments to the lowest level of enforcement against adult consensual sex workers. In spite of everything we learned through the years of the missing women and the Supreme Court striking down prostitution laws in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, which recognized that laws and enforcement practices that restrict how sex workers protect themselves increase the risk of violence.

In British Columbia, the Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry made clear that systemic failures in policing — including the marginalization and displacement of sex workers — contributed to preventable loss of life.

Have we learned nothing?

Do the commitments of the RCMP to sex worker safety mean nothing?

Did the RCMP even consider the impact their actions would have on the safety of sex workers?

Parliament claimed that sex work was decriminalized and that sex worker safety must be a priority. That was the promise. That was their intent.

And yet here we are — watching the same approaches re-emerge, dressed up in the language of human trafficking, but producing the same conditions we know increase danger.

We know where this road goes.

No one can deny the terrible price paid by the women who lost their lives when these kinds of practices undermined their safety.

And now we are being asked to believe that this time will be different.

At what point will police honour their word? At what point will the cycle of harm — driven by discrimination and the desire to score political points — finally stop?

We are not reasonable casualties in the fight against human trafficking.

We are human beings.

We have families. We have people who need us.

And we have already paid the price for getting this wrong.

We will not quietly pay it again.

• Susan Davis
Executive director, BC Coalition of Experiential Communities