Campers and needles: Growing problem in some Vancouver parks

His nickname is Razor and he's one of many people camping overnight in a Vancouver city park.

"There's a lot of homeless, they put up their tents at night and take them down in the daytime," he said.

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As the weather improves the number of campers showing up in downtown parks starts to spike. So does the number of discarded needles.

Bylaws forbid people from camping overnight in city parks, but bylaw officers take a "soft" approach, making sure campers leave during the day.

Razor has been pitching his tent in Andy Livingston Park for two weeks and packs his belongings into a well-organized cart every morning. He even carries a broom to keep things neat, insisting it's not campers who are leaving behind all the used needles. 

"People come here who don't sleep here and make a mess," he said. "They drink or do their dope and we get blamed for it. It's not us, but we got to take the heat for it. We clean it up anyway. That's why I always got a broom."

On Wednesday morning park rangers collected over 40 discarded needles on their daily sweep of Andy Livingston. It has been identified as a  "hot spot park" which means staff are deployed every morning to clean up whatever has been left behind from the night before. 

"Two rangers go there every morning at eight o'clock and they do a sweep of the park, usually with a community policing officer," said Vancouver Parks director Howard Normann, who agrees it's not necessarily the campers causing the needle problem.

City staff have considered installing needle disposal boxes in Andy Livingston, but Normann doesn't think that's a solution.

The park has a number of sports fields, and the International Village Elementary School will soon open there too.

"The idea of trying needle boxes in the park may help but we don't want to start encouraging people to be picking up needles themselves and depositing them because that's a danger as well," he said. "And the person that comes there at two in the morning and shoots up behind a hedge isn't necessarily going to walk over and deposit a needle in a needle box."

Last month a mother of a student attending Lord Roberts Annex in the West End found seven needles discarded overnight in the school garden right beside Nelson Park, an area frequented by overnight campers.

Normann says after Nelson Park was identified as a hot spot park crews were dispatched and the needle problem seems to have less of a problem. 

But he also says it's likely whoever was discarding needles at the school is now doing the same somewhere else. 

"People move around, people move into the city on an ongoing basis. One day there could be a 100 needles in one location, the next day it could be ten."