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