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Responding to police in health service settings: Know your rights, protect your clients
When? Thursday, 13 August 2026, 12:00 PST
Where? Online – REGISTER HERE
We are grateful to co-host an upcoming webinar titled Responding to Police in Health Service Settings: Know Your Rights, Protect Your Clients, on Thursday August 13th, 2026, at 12pm PST with Caitlin Shane, staff lawyer at Pivot Legal Society. Caitlin will introduce Pivot’s new resource for service providers in BC seeking to reduce police interference in healthcare settings and in the lives of their clients.
Following the BC government's termination of its decriminalization pilot in January 2026, Pivot received an increase in reports from health service providers concerning police entering their services and intimidating their clients. The result? A chilling effect on clients’ access to care services – consistent with what people who use drugs have cautioned for years. In response, Pivot published Responding to Police in Health Service Settings: Know Your Rights, Protect Your Clients. Whether you are publicly or privately employed; rural, urban, or remote; professionally licensed or unlicensed; or working in sanctioned or unsanctioned settings, this guide offers practical tools to protect yourself and your clients against unwanted police interference.
Caitlin will give a short training (+ Q&A) based on the new guide, including:
- Your rights when speaking to police
- Your rights when police request client information or belongings
- Your rights when documenting police actions
- Tips for creating workplace policies to reduce police entry to services
Caitlin Shane is a staff lawyer at Pivot Legal Society, a human rights organization based in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. As Pivot's drug policy lawyer, Caitlin takes direction from drug user-led movements. She has appeared at the Supreme Court of Canada, the Federal Court of Canada, and the BC Supreme Court. Prior to becoming a lawyer, Caitlin worked as an outreach and harm reduction worker in tent cities, safe injection sites, and low income housing.