With more than 300 journalists accredited to cover the murder trial of Robert William Pickton, Vancouver police and social agencies are trying to protect prostitutes in the city's Downtown Eastside from unwanted media attention.

They have released video of interviews with sex-trade workers for media use, to keep reporters and their cameras from descending on the troubled neighbourhood.

Social worker Kate Gibson organized interviews with sex-trade workers for the handout video.
(CBC)

Social worker Kate Gibson, who organized the interviews, said community groups have been working with the police to prepare sex workers for a media blitz.

"The Vancouver Police Department offered to give us a media training day. So we spent a whole day working on media training and things that could happen, and starting to make plans for when this trial began."

Mary Lynn Young, a  professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia, said she suspects the police are trying to improve their image after being accused of ignoring pleas to protect the sex-trade workers during the years when they were disappearing.

"I think that is image building on behalf of the police department," she said. "I hope there is altruism there as well, but I think you have to look at police corporate relations as a part of a 20-year process that is getting increasingly slick and polished."

The police had been hoping to get the video material into the hands of foreign journalists in town for the trial. But none showed up at the police briefing on Monday.

Pickton, 57, is on trial facing six charges of first-degree murder in the deaths of six women who went missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside between 1997 and 2001.

He also faces 20 other first-degree murder charges involving women missing from the Downtown Eastside, many of them prostitutes and drug addicts.

The judge hearing the case split it into two trials last year, saying that trying all 26 murder charges together would make the trial too long, and place too much of a burden on the jury.