One of the many weird quirks of the rat’s nest of redundancy over at TransLink is how outside police agencies have to interact with Transit Police to get ahold of CCTV footage from TransLink.
The CCTV footage from SkyTrain stations, for example, is held by the B.C. Rapid Transit Company, the TransLink subsidiary. Instead of just going directly to SkyTrain, VPD, RCMP and other police forces have to make a formal request to the Transit Police, who then take the request to the B.C. Rapid Transit Company, who then find the footage and hand it over to the Transit Police, who then take it and turn it over to the jurisdictional agency that requested it. Rinse and repeat.
This has the side benefit for the Transit Police of boosting the number of non-fare evasion files they can report they worked on - even though all they did was hand over a tape someone at the B.C. Rapid Transit Company found for them.
We recently used the Freedom of Information Act to request an annual breakdown of the number of CCTV requests from third party police agencies. Here is the response:
In 2010: 102
In 2011: 110
In 2012: 98
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