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3

Police Patrol, 1975–79

Cedar Cottage

Since I had enrolled in the Criminal Justice Program at Langara only to prepare myself for joining the Vancouver Police Department, I left the program prior to my final term when the job with the police was offered. I was happy to move on, knowing that, if I wanted, I could eventually return to school and pick up the courses I hadn’t completed. I also knew that seniority was an important issue in a union environment. As a result, I was senior to friends in my college class who stayed at Langara to complete the program, and I remained senior to all of them for the more than thirty-one years I served with the VPD.

For policing purposes, the city of Vancouver is split into four districts. District One is the northwest or downtown sector. District Two is the Downtown Eastside all the way to Boundary Road. District Three is East Vancouver, with Broadway its north boundary, Main Street the west boundary and the Fraser River the south boundary. District Four encompasses the southwest sector of the city. To identify patrol assignments, numbers one through four are used as the prefix of each car’s call sign, so Car 3A21 is a car working in District Three. The Alpha in the call sign means that the unit is dayshift as opposed to Charlie (afternoons) or Echo (night shift).

For my first four years of policing I was assigned to Team 34 (Cedar Cottage) in District Three. I had pretty much spent all of my school years in the East End, so I was policing in my comfort zone. I had the same partner for four years, both of us just out of the police academy, and I’m guessing the only reason the sergeant allowed two rookies to work together was because we already had a history of making good arrests. My badge number was 652, and being my classmate, my partner, Shawn Crowther, had badge number 653, but for constables sworn in on the same day, seniority is alphabetical, so Crowther, by virtue of the alphabet, was junior to me. As senior man, I had first pick of vacation leave, while he was given every wagon-driver assignment, every jail-guard position and every dirty job that came along for a rookie to fill.

One of my first “inside jobs” was working six months at the Cedar Cottage Community Police Office in 1976.

Crowther didn’t like to drive, which suited me just fine. If we were assigned one of the new Plymouth Gran Fury Police Special 360 V-8 rocket ships, it was our practice to lift and reverse the air filter pan to maximize oxygen flow to the carburetor and maintain the fuel level at half a tank to minimize the vehicle weight. (This is one good reason why two twenty-year-old police officers should never be allowed to work together!) While I enjoyed driving, I never felt the need to own a new car. Police cars were always going to be faster, shinier and more expensive than anything I could ever afford. While I was in college, I had driven an old Volkswagen Bug. Then one winter evening in 1974 it was flattened to the front windshield by a new driver who thought it would be a good idea to slide northbound through a stop sign at Vancouver’s Commercial/Victoria Diversion and hit me head-on while I was heading south. I replaced the Bug with a Chevrolet Vega, but its aluminum motor promptly blew up while I was crossing the Port Mann Bridge. These were the types of cars I had always owned.

I have always maintained that Sunday is a good day to do police work. First, there are fewer citizens mobile in the city because they tend to stay home with their families. Second, the police, responding to a lack of traffic and activity (and hockey on the tube), tend to stand down from aggressive and proactive policing. Third, drug addicts (who commit most of Vancouver’s crime), driven by a need for narcotics that doesn’t recognize a calendar, are as active as ever. Thus, one has a quarry-rich environment with few hunters.

One Sunday, Crowther was away and I was assigned to a late dayshift working a one-man car. I presented myself to the duty corporal to pick up my radio and car keys and was told that there were no vehicles available. I gave him a what’s-next? shrug, and he thought for a second. Then, relenting, he said, “Okay, the sergeant’s brand new car has just come in from the paint and decal shop. He’s not in today so you can take it out. Don’t put a scratch on it.”

About 11 a.m. I was southbound on Renfrew Street, approaching 22nd Avenue; to my left was Renfrew Pool, where in my previous life I had spent a lot of time lifeguarding. That’s when I saw a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air coming toward me. The sunlight gleamed off its custom lacquer, and its chrome sparkled and flashed. What a perfect day to cruise the city in your polished ride, I thought. That hot rod was shinier than the spanking new Plymouth Fury that I was driving. But as the Chevy passed me going northbound, I looked through the driver’s-side window to see two drug addicts in the front seat, both higher than a kite. I hit the lights, turned on the siren and broadcast the pursuit. They went faster and I went faster, and the chase was on. We finally ended up back near 20th and Renfrew, where they turned west. I took the corner, tires screaming, and saw gravel, dust and smoke coming out of an alley. At the lane intersection an older fellow was mowing his lawn, and like a traffic bobby he waved his arms and pointed down the lane. I took that corner at about sixty kilometres an hour and was accelerating when I hit the telephone pole. This was in the days before seat belts, and the sudden stop launched me into the rear-view mirror, where I left a four-inch strip of my scalp.

Sitting in the rubble, I looked up through the smashed windshield to see that the lane terminated another thirty metres farther up, where it came to a T and turned east. The classic Chevy had failed to make the turn and had embedded itself in somebody’s garage. Both car doors were open. I got out of my car and ran to the vehicle and then eastbound toward Renfrew Park. When the dog squad arrived in company with other units, I was taken to the nearby fire hall for preliminary bandaging before a patrol unit transported me to Vancouver General Hospital. Before they took me away I told the policeman, “Drive past the sergeant’s car. I want to have a look at it.” When we arrived back in the alley, a tow truck driver had already winched the wreck up onto a flatbed and was shovelling extraneous pieces from the road into the front seat through the smashed-out windshield. The telephone pole was snapped but still standing. Meanwhile, the dog master had tracked the driver of the Bel Air into the gully in Renfrew Park, where he was arrested. Periodically I would drive past the accident scene. The telephone pole, though clearly broken, was not replaced for many years. And I would smile as I recalled the corporal handing me the keys to the sergeant’s car and warning me not to put a scratch on it.

About 9 a.m. on another lovely Sunday, Crowther and I were northbound on Commercial Drive approaching 12th Avenue when we noticed a loony-looking white male walking northbound on the west side of the street. He was wearing a loose-fitting shirt and cut-off jeans. Noticing (and I maintain that Crowther noticed it first) that the loon had an erection that bulged up the front of his cut-offs, I did a U-turn and pulled over to the curb to talk to him. We did a quick record check over the radio and were told that there was an arrest warrant in effect for him for rape. Who would have thought?

One Monday Crowther and I were driving northbound on Knight Street at about 28th Avenue when a call came across the radio about two men fighting in a parking lot at 25th. We rolled into the lot a minute later and found a fellow in his seventies standing over a drug addict in his mid-twenties who was lying on his back, shaking. There was a big hole, a really big hole, dead centre in his chest and an old .455-calibre Enfield-style revolver lying on the ground between the old man and the addict. The pool of blood on the ground was big and getting bigger. The older fellow said, “I was taking the money from the church to the bank over there.” I did chest compressions and Crowther did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. That was the first time I gave first aid to an injured party who didn’t make it.

Later I went down to speak to the investigators in Homicide to check on the status of the case. I spoke to one of the most senior members of the team, who was smoking a cigar at his desk. He looked up, noticed that I was visibly shaken and said, “Kid, that guy was shot right through the aorta. If it had happened in the operating room of St. Paul’s Hospital, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was a goner. You did everything you could.” This was reassuring. I went on to ask about the gun. To me it had seemed to be the type of gun that an old “navy guy” would have in his closet and bring out only when escorting money from the church to the bank. The old detective thought about it for a second and then said, “Nah. It’s much more likely that we’re going to find out that old hand cannon was stolen in some break-in.” He was probably right, and I never heard anything further about the file.

What’s the Score?

Early in my police career I started counting the instances I administered first aid to the seriously injured. Total number of times: fourteen. Total number of survivors: none. When I got to number thirteen, I thought that this would be the turning point, that thirteen would actually become somebody’s lucky number. Wrong. Then I thought number fourteen would break the curse. Wrong. At number fourteen I was about halfway through my career, but by then I began to recognize when it was just too late to help.

The first time someone died despite my attempts was the robbery suspect with the big hole in his chest. Another serious-injury call that I’ll never forget was a case of sudden infant death syndrome. Though I’ve given it a lot of thought, other than the fact that I kept a running tally, I have no memory of the specifics relating to any of the others. But as I didn’t count those who probably would have survived without immediate medical intervention, I figure it was my willingness to do first aid in cases where there were grievous injuries that probably contributed to my lack of success. But I never hesitated to take action in crisis situations and enjoyed the role of problem solver.

Before the Hostage Negotiation Unit was formally attached to the Emergency Response Team, negotiations were simply handled by people who had taken the training. In 1982 I took the Crisis Management Instructors Course at the Federal Training Academy in Ottawa, and as a result, I was called in to talk two “jumpers” off of the Lions Gate Bridge, and I persuaded one barricaded gunman to surrender to the police. One of the strategies I used to talk people off of bridges was to tell them that of over 1,500 people who had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, thirty-two had survived (as of 2013 the total is thirty-four). I would go on to tell the would-be jumper that when each of the thirty-two was interviewed about their suicide attempt, every single one of them said that, as they fell to what they believed would be their certain death, they had changed their minds. On the two occasions that I used this strategy, it planted enough of a seed of doubt that my would-be jumpers also changed their minds and climbed back to the roadway. The truth is, I had no idea whether or not those thirty-two had changed their minds or not. In the case of one of the suicidal males, I promised him that before taking him in for assessment, I would have a drink with him. Once in custody I escorted him to a restaurant on Davie Street, where we each had a beer, which was interrupted when the duty officer attended the location and requested an explanation.

While I enjoy solving serious problems, I didn’t see myself in the role of a hostage negotiator formally attached to the Emergency Response Team, so when the opportunity presented itself to join, I didn’t take it. For the same reason I let my IED (improvised explosive device) credentials lapse. I didn’t want be defined as the VPD’s “go-to guy” for explosives. With the credentials comes a notation on the daily duty sheet that you are the resident expert and that designation results in you being assigned to every associated incident. I just didn’t want my work-life disrupted by being summoned to the scene of every suspicious package or barricaded man.

What does a policeman do when it’s really slow in his area? For Crowther and I the answer was to cross the boundary into Team 35’s area where the provincial government operated a methadone clinic, and check drug addicts. One day we were in Team 35 territory, westbound on 8th Avenue near Quebec Street, approaching a large parking lot to our north, when we saw five drug addicts doing a death march toward us. The one in front had his head down, an apparent captive, his movements apparently being controlled by the addict directly behind him. The three others were just following. We saw each other at the same time. They stopped, and it was like the graveyard scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with the gunfighters Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes staring each other down before committing to action. I floored the gas pedal and we rocketed through the parking lot. There was a momentary hesitation, then the fellow in the front ran toward us, the addict behind him tossed down a double-barrelled shotgun, then he and his buddies scattered westbound. We caught the victim and the fellow who had been carrying the shotgun, but the others escaped. This was the last chapter in another drug debt gone bad.

I have many theories about policing. One of these relates to why criminals who don’t hesitate to shoot each other are much less likely to shoot at the police. The theory goes something like this: In western Canada, we have criminals still free in society who have pages and pages of information detailing their criminal convictions because we have the most liberal judges in the civilized world, judges who are incapable of dealing with these repeat offenders who, in a sane world, would never be released from prison. (Not all of our judges, just the vast majority.)

Elsewhere in Canada—and only recently in Vancouver—the definition of a chronic offender was a person who has five criminal convictions in a year. In Vancouver there were so many offenders included in this category that dealing with them was unworkable. Now, to fit the chronic-offender classification in Vancouver the person must have twelve criminal convictions in a year. The Vancouver Police Board was recently told that sixty of these chronic offenders have seventy-five convictions or more, twenty-six have one hundred or more convictions, and the worst four have one hundred fifty convictions or more. So the positive spin on this situation is that criminals generally avoid engaging with the police in violent interaction where injury or death might result, because there is so little consequence when they are caught and convicted.

Liberal judges are not a new phenomenon on the West Coast. When later in my career I was assigned to the Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit, the Vancouver Police Historical Society asked me to review the evidence in the murder of Constable Ernest Sargent in 1927 in an effort to understand why the person who did it was charged but not convicted. My review concluded that Constable Sargent was murdered while walking the beat at 11th Avenue and Alder, probably by a notorious criminal named Leong Chung. The statement of the hospitalized and dying constable was weak in that he was unable to describe accurately the number of times he had fired his weapon (he thought three when in fact the number was six) and his positive ID of the suspect in a nine-person photo lineup was tainted because detectives had days earlier shown him a picture of the suspect.

Nonetheless, Chung was arrested and at two different jails admitted the murder of Sargent to two different snitches. The first judge cautioned the jury about the danger of believing the testimony of jailhouse rats but, being guided by case law, he allowed the testimony to be weighed. A conviction followed, then an appeal. The Appellate Court judge excluded the testimony of the jailhouse informants and Chung was ultimately found not guilty.

And now to the fastest confession ever obtained. The undercover RCMP member made his initial approach toward the murder suspect with the request to participate in some shady, but risk-free undertaking for some quick cash. The suspect looked over at him and said, “I don’t know if you want to get involved with me, man. I killed a guy a few years ago and the cops are still all over me.” The suspect was assured that his previous malfeasance wouldn’t be a problem.

A Case of Best-laid Plans

A woman in her late eighties lived alone in her family home on 12th Avenue just east of Victoria Drive. Her son had moved to the suburbs and visited frequently, but she wanted to maintain her independence in her own home. Recognizing that she was frail, she had set up a system with her next-door neighbour. Every morning she would lift up the shade in her kitchen, and this would be a signal to the neighbour that all was well. When the shade wasn’t lifted one Friday morning, the neighbour thought, “Oh, she has probably just forgotten,” but didn’t take any action to confirm that theory. But on Saturday the shade was still down and the neighbour called the police.

I was the acting corporal that morning and as Crowther and I rolled up to the scene, so did another constable and a female reserve officer whose day job was practicing medicine. At the time, Crowther and I took turns kicking in doors, which is pretty much the most fun a police officer can have. It was his turn. The neighbour showed up at the door and told us that the woman’s son was on his way and would be on-site with a key in about twenty minutes.

I looked over at Crowther and said, “Kick it in.”

The neighbour said, “But he’ll be here in twenty minutes!”

Crowther gave me the look that said, “We are just going in to find a body so there’s really no hurry.”

I told Crowther, “Kick it in now, or I’ll kick it in, and this one still counts as your turn.”

That old door just exploded in splinters from the frame. I went in first, checking the lower rooms, expecting to find a corpse, but as I went up the stairs, I heard a weak voice calling, “Police, help! Police!” The woman had fallen down between the kitchen table and wall and was unable to extricate herself. Our reserve doctor and I helped the woman up, and she asked, “Why didn’t they call you yesterday? The shade was down.”