A tank-like armoured personnel carrier is back on the police wish list

In Saving Private Ryan, the 1998 World War II film starring Tom Hanks, there is a scene with a sniper. It starts off simply enough: Hanks and his squad enter a French village, where they find a family with children in a bombed-out house. The family begs the soldiers to take the kids out of the warzone. Hanks says no, but Caparzo—god damn Caparzo—disobeys orders and takes a little girl. “She reminds me of my niece,” he says. Hanks rips the child out of Caparzo’s arms and reprimands him. Then Caparzo gets shot.

What follows is a gut-wrenching few minutes. The squad’s sharpshooter slinks off to find the German sniper. The rest of the squad waits until it’s safe to help, powerless to do anything as Caparzo dies a slow, agonizing death in the rain.

In case you’re wondering what watching a young Vin Diesel give an Oscar-worthy performance has to do with Halifax’s municipal politics, it’s because Diesel’s Caparzo could have been saved if his squad had an armoured personnel carrier.

In last year’s budget, the Halifax regional police bought two armoured Ford F350s, and they are seeking to buy another vehicle in this year’s capital budget. The first two have already been purchased for a total of $410,000. The third one has yet to be approved by council in February; it’s part of a bundle of specialized police vehicles totalling $1,525,000.

Even though it remains extremely unlikely that the people of Halifax will be shot by a Nazi sniper and left to die on Barrington Street while Halifax Regional Police officers watch on, powerless to help, it could have happened on Valentine’s Day in 2015. Five years later, a denturist, not a Nazi, could have created the same situation if he wasn’t killed at the Enfield Big Stop.

When it comes to other professions, like healthcare, it is very easy to understand that life is important and worthy of protection, regardless of the statistical occurrence of a disease or disability. Much of the public debate in healthcare, like funding drugs for a small percentage of the population, is fundamentally the same as the one about armoured personnel carriers; what amount of state spending is appropriate when compared to the likelihood of occurrence?

Critics of the general militarization of police or this specific APC purchase will say that in Halifax’s recent history, there have only been two times when an APC might have been used, and both times, the situation was averted. Therefore, there is no need for these vehicles, especially when considering the risk, which is why the Board of Police Commissioners exists in the first place. The people that Tom Hanks and Vin Diesel were fighting were Nazis, and their rise to power in the early 1930s relied heavily on a politically loyal, militarized police force. The makeup of Halifax’s police oversight board—three residents of HRM and three councillors—is supposed to be the public’s intermediaries between the levers of power and the practical application of the state’s power through violence, as we’ve seen throughout history. In theory, we, the public, do not want to be oppressed by police violence, and one of the best ways for the board to prevent that from happening is to not give the police weapons like APCs. Ergo, the board (and council) should not buy the police APCs.

Proponents of the APC purchase will argue that even though most people aren’t violent, and even though violence is rare, there will always be people who colour outside the accepted lines of society. Between homegrown bad actors and other countries not playing by our rules, there will always be violence, or at the very least, the potential for violence in our society. And if there’s going to be violence in society, our governments should have a monopoly on it. But once someone decides to start shooting, it is almost impossible to capture them without the threat of a small army of police officers, or to stop them without a gun. Even in our most peaceful utopian visions of the future, like in the Star Trek universe, the phasers have a setting stronger than stun. Violence will always be a part of our society, no matter how small a part. Ergo, the board (and council) should equip the police to deal with that on our behalf, just in case.

Because the world is big and messy, the tricky part about this debate is that both main arguments are more or less correct. We do need our violence professionals to plan for a world in which violence exists. We also need to plan for a world in which a police force turns against the civilian population it is supposed to protect. So what do you do?

The situation the police say they need APCs for is not unlike the situation facing Hanks and Diesel in Saving Private Ryan. How do you get to someone in the open when bad guys are shooting? There are a few options:

Infantry fighting vehicles: these bad boys are everything anyone needs for mechanized warfare. In Canada most people would be familiar with our Light Armoured Vehicles AKA LAVs, which are essentially light tanks with wheels instead of treads.

This LAV is not an armoured personnel carrier on the APC spectrum from tank to truck. Credit: Amqui / licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

If Tom Hanks had a few of these, he could have put them between Vin Diesel and the sniper, then dumped rounds from the cannon into the clock tower while Giovanni Ribisi used the cover of the LAV to save Diesel so he could survive the war and live a long life, complete with racing souped-up Honda Civics in space. But that’s way, way too urban-warfare and inappropriate for the HRP, so that’s out.

Armoured personnel carriers: If fighting vehicles are characterized by what bullets they can shoot out, APCs are characterized by what bullets they don’t let in. This focus on defence means APCs are less militarized than infantry fighting vehicles, as their primary design focus is getting people into and out of dangerous situations safely. But there is a spectrum, from vehicles that give tank vibes to things that look more like regular old pick-up trucks. Because in the trade of violence a good offence is a good defence, some of the APCs on the militarized end of the spectrum can have things like firing ports so people inside the vehicle can do some shooting. This is the type of thing the HRP wanted to buy the last time we were talking about police tanks, the Terradyne MPV armoured personnel carrier, which looks like this:

Halifax Regional Police want to buy one of these tank-y APCs. Again. Credit: Halton Police

However, its firing ports and other urban-warfare utility features made it too military for Halifax council to approve, and it’s more than the police need so it was also rejected.

In the intervening years since that APC was rejected, the police went back to the drawing board. If rescuing people from violence is a core part of their job—the same way firefighters are tasked with rescuing people from fire—then they need the appropriate tools. One way to suppress enemy combatants in a violent rescue situation is to use covering gunfire, excessively shooting in the enemy’s general direction, but we probably don’t want police to be doing that in the densely populated downtown core. So they turned to rescue vehicles and in last year’s budget the HRP asked for and got a pair of armoured Ford F350s, a bulky variant of the pick-up truck widely available in Halifax, that’s expected to look something like this:

Hallifax council already approved the police buying two truck-style APCs, like International Armour Group’s armoured F350. Credit: IAG

This has everything the police are looking for in an APC, and as an added bonus—since there will be at most three of them in the police fleet—it’s likely that police in these F350s will injure, kill and maim far fewer Haligonians than drivers of the other F350s on HRM’s roads will. As APCs go, the F350 will do exactly what the police need, with no urban-warfare add-ons with a potential for violence (beyond the ones we accept on our daily commutes).

However, as sensible a choice as the F3350 is, that’s not what the police are asking for in the 2025/26 budget. This wasn’t made explicit at the Board of Police Commissioners meeting, and required multiple clarifications with the police to get a clear answer, but in a phone call HRP spokesperson Marla MacInnes confirmed this year’s budget ask—and thus confirming the HRP seems to have learned nothing from a few years ago. The vehicle being proposed for the capital budget is once again a militarized APC designed to fight fire with fire, something from the tank end of the APC spectrum like the Terradyne MPV, a multi-purpose vehicle with firing ports and an optional machine gun turret.

HRP won’t say if they’re asking for the optional machine gun turret shown in this schematic drawing of the Terradyne MPV. Credit: Terradyne Armoured Vehicles Inc.

We don’t know if a machine gun turret is included in what specifically the police are asking for because “due to the nature of the work these vehicles are used for,” MacInnes said in an email, “it would pose a security threat to share further details about the vehicle and its features.”

This is a weird move by the police because after the Terradyne tank was rejected by council the first time for being too militarized, it seems like the Halifax Regional Police went back to the drawing board and actually put some thought into their vehicle purchases. It seems like they considered council’s previous instructions, the police’s role in society and their operation needs. When they considered all that, they picked a truck-style APC that was most appropriate for the job of a hot extraction in a civilian city in times of peace—and council approved buying two of them. What is the situation the police are envisioning, which will require a hailstorm of police bullets to be sent into the streets of Halifax from inside the safety of a tank?

Beyond specific APC options, the larger debate about police vehicles and police spending as a whole is fraught because within this debate is the underlying argument that no matter how peaceful it is most of the time, we live in a world of violence. At its core, this is the debate the city is having about police reform. If we accept that we live in a world where violence exists, and if we accept that violence will come to Halifax for the occasional visit, who should deal with it if not the police? And if the police are to be responsible for dealing with violence, how do we equip them to do it? And if the police are equipped and trained for violence, how do we protect ourselves from that training?

Whatever you come up with when pondering these questions, you have until Jan 8, 2025 at 3pm to decide if you want to share your thoughts with the Board of Police Commissioners. That’s the date of the virtual meeting to get your feedback. People interested in participating in the conversation can contact clerks@halifax.ca at least 24 hours before the start of the meeting to register as a speaker.