VicPD doesn’t want you to know they’re probably still hitting people with police cars

I’ve written multiple stories about how VicPD uses police cars to intentionally hit cyclists and pedestrians, contrary to their own policies and despite past findings of police misconduct for doing so.

Last year I filed an FOI request to see if they’re still hitting people with their cars. The answer is “probably,” but we can’t say for sure, because VicPD doesn’t want anyone to know.

While the department says they’re “always striving to be as transparent and accountable as possible,” VicPD has started redacting reports on its officers’ actions to the point of uselessness.

Redaction to obscure police action

Most of the 11 cases we know of where VicPD intentionally hit someone with police cars are only public because of FOI requests or police misconduct reports.

I followed up on those past FOIs to ask for VicPD’s use of force reports from late 2023 to 2025 where officers said they used “other” types of force beyond their standard weapons. “Other” types of force include police cars.

In the past, VicPD has released enough detail to get a sense of what the officer says they did when they hit someone. Not anymore. This time, VicPD withheld one report in its entirety, which may or may not have been about using a police car as a weapon, and otherwise sent back heavily redacted reports that obscure their officers’ actions.

“Police vehicle siding” as a weapon

In one report from January 2024, VicPD only lets us know the officer used “police vehicle siding” as a weapon. VicPD is happy to let us know how the officer tried to justify their actions, but we don’t learn anything about those actions.

From the limited disclosure, it seems like the officer wasn’t in their car at the time, but even that’s not certain. Did the officer physically throw the person into the side of the police car, then? Maybe, or maybe not. We don’t know, because VicPD won’t say. All we’re allowed to know is from the summary of “improvised weapons” used, where the officer says they used police vehicle siding as a weapon for a “hard strike.” The officer wrote a narrative account of what they did, but VicPD fully redacted it.

It serves VicPD’s interests, not the public’s, to release text justifying their officers’ actions, while not releasing any text about what they did. To get a sense of the extreme level of secrecy VicPD is now employing, here’s an excerpt from a past FOI where the same officer describes using his car door to hit a cyclist in 2021. Unlike the current FOI, VicPD provided the officer’s full description of their actions.

“Police vehicle” as a weapon

When an officer says they used a “police vehicle” as a weapon, it can be incredibly serious. For example, in a previous case where a VicPD officer said they used their “police vehicle,” they had pinned someone against a building. Since 2017, at least three VicPD officers have been found to have committed misconduct for using a police vehicle as a weapon.

From this latest FOI, we can see that one emergency response team officer says they used their “police vehicle” as a weapon in December 2024.

But what did they do? We don’t know. Right below an instruction that says “Do not just write ‘refer to the [general occurrence report],” the officer says simply to “See [their] police statement.” Even if that statement had been included, it would have been heavily redacted. So while this officer says he used his car as a weapon, we will likely never know how.

Two officers filed reports seemingly related to the same event. One said they witnessed a redacted something “strike an Emergency Response Team truck,” causing… something. The other officer described hearing “a loud crash” that they later learned “was a collision with a police vehicle.”

In past FOIs, when officers intentionally cut off cyclists or people on scooters, forcing them to crash into their car, they used similar language. For example, they wrote that the person “rode into,” “t-boned,” or otherwise struck their vehicle. While that precedent suggests the same could be true here (that VicPD forced a cyclist to “strike” their car, for example), VicPD withheld all the information that would let us know what actually happened, preventing any meaningful conclusions or scrutiny of their actions. Anything might have happened, and VicPD won’t let us know what.

Re-released report shows VicPD’s diminishing transparency

As part of this FOI, VicPD sent a handful of files they had already sent for a previous FOI. They applied their new standards for redaction, which provides clear evidence that the department is choosing to withhold more public information.

Take this report where the VicPD officer said they used a “police vehicle” as a weapon in 2023. Two years ago, VicPD was happy to admit they were responding to someone on a scooter. In the re-released record, they withheld that information.

That’s not where the new redactions stopped. From the narrative they released this time, it’s hard to tell what happened. An officer saw something, then they drove onto the sidewalk to cut off something, then something happened, then the officer got out of his car, and then something else happened. We can’t tell if the officer intentionally drove into someone, forced someone to crash, or physically shoved someone into the side of their car.

Flipping back and forth between the same report as they released it in 2024, you can see what the officer says happened, and how little they released this time. The officer cut off someone on an electric scooter, forcing them to crash into their police car, a technique VicPD also uses with cyclists. The officer then got out and threw the person to the ground.

If I had only filed this request last year, we would never have known that VicPD forced someone on a scooter to crash into their car. VicPD’s new position is that those details are sensitive personal information, even though there is no way to identify the individual involved. In reality, it’s heavy-handed redaction that serves VicPD’s interests through secrecy.

Limiting access to information limits accountability

Is VicPD still hitting people with their cars and/or forcing people to crash into their cars? Probably, based on past reports and the December 2024 report where the officer said they used a police vehicle as a weapon. But because of VicPD’s increasing redactions, we may never know the details of that case and others like it unless people come forward. VicPD spends over $700,000 on communications each year to shape the public’s perception of what they do, and they choose not to highlight their use of police cars as weapons.

VicPD’s decision to reduce access to public records through FOI limits our ability to scrutinize their actions. I only learned about VicPD’s use of the “other” category of police use of force, which includes hitting people with police cars, through another FOI on VicPD’s use of force data. That FOI also exposed VicPD’s continued use of “vascular neck restraints” and how often they injure people in VicPD cells and headquarters, data VicPD said they didn’t have and couldn’t provide.

When I requested an updated copy of VicPD’s use of force data last year, which is held by the province, VicPD asked them not to release the records, and the province complied. That’s despite the fact that it’s a straightforward dataset about what VicPD did, and whether they hurt the people they did it to.

I’ve appealed that decision to the privacy commissioner, but that means months of delay while VicPD continues to use weapons and other types of force on people every day. And a negative ruling could mean that the only way to get data on things like police violence in jails might disappear for good.

By hiding how their officers use police cars as weapons, and insisting that the province not release use of force data, it’s clear that VicPD wants less public scrutiny, even as they demand more and more public money.

Thumbnail image of police vehicle is from vicpd.ca