Three I was ready for a change. I applied for a transfer to the Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit (CLEU), a provincially funded, integrated team responsible for the investigation of organized crime. When Crowther heard about my application, he urged me to apply instead to the Traffic Enforcement Unit as he had. I couldn’t imagine two entities more diametrically opposed than these two divisions. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll ride those beautiful Harleys! It will be great and we won’t have to take any more reports.” Crowther had ridden bikes before he came onto the job. I was thinking that the only time I had ever ridden a motorcycle was when a friend lent me a Yamaha 250 that I promptly rode into a ditch near Tannery Road in Surrey.
Fast-forward six months and I was sitting in the personnel inspector’s office to talk about my transfer. “I can see that you have applied both for CLEU and the Traffic Division. As it happens, we have openings coming up in both. Where do you want to go?”
I chose Traffic because I thought it would be a lot more fun, and two weeks later I was being fitted for custom-made Wellington-style motorcycle boots.
Motorcycle Training
In 1979 Vancouver’s police motorcycle training was done in-house on the grounds of the Pacific National Exhibition in East Vancouver. Eight new members of the Traffic Division arrived for training; along with Crowther, they included two of my academy classmates, Dan Dureau and Christopher Shore. We had all joined the force as nineteen-year-olds. When we were ushered toward a row of intimidating 1200cc Harley-Davidson motorcycles, I asked the instructor, “Where are the smaller bikes that we are going to train on?”
“These are the bikes we train with,” he said. “Pick one and get on it.”
We started by learning how to coordinate clutch and brake movements and stopping and starting from a straight line. Then cones were set up, and we practiced riding in circles that got tighter and tighter as the course progressed. At the end of the two-week-long course, we headed over to the government facility off Willingdon Avenue in Burnaby, where we all passed the test and received our Class 6 motorcycle licences.
Junior members of the squad were assigned the oldest bikes. In that era Harley-Davidson had been bought up by a recreational equipment manufacturer where quality control was so poor that when the bikes were displayed new in the showroom, sales personnel left sheets of cardboard under the engines so the dripping oil wouldn’t stain the floor. So not only did we have the oldest bikes, they were also the worst motorcycles Harley-Davidson ever produced. I chose to work in the northwest sector of the city because traffic congestion there was so bad that I knew I would routinely be the first officer at the scene of a crime. But when I rode out of the Cordova Street garage to begin my shift, rather than ride west to my assigned sector, I would ride south toward the motorcycle repair shop at Manitoba Street and Marine Drive because by the time I arrived there, something on the bike would have broken and needed fixing.
Cruising northbound on Marshall Street towards Trout Lake on my police Harley-Davidson 1200. These bikes were so poorly made that you could never be sure you would be able to start the engine again after turning it off.
The purpose of having a Traffic Division is to move traffic safely through the city, and that mandate is fulfilled by punishing those who refuse to drive safely. And yes, we did have a ticket quota: fifteen tickets per ten-hour shift. The four of us routinely wrote thirty tickets each shift, and this took three or four hours of focused effort. The rest of our time was spent riding through the sector, showing the flag, doing informal enforcement, crime prevention and covering calls.
Our sergeant was Derek Edwards, a large, powerful man, and at one meeting he became completely incensed at those constables who consistently refused to meet our ticket quota or any other reasonable work standard. Frank Nordel, attempting to justify his own lack of productivity, stood up and expounded on the importance of writing quality tickets, not just a quantity of them. “You should be able to write two to three quality tickets in a shift,” he said, suggesting that to write more would be counterproductive. Edwards admonished him, saying that two to three tickets was not going to cut it, and he walked out, completely frustrated by the demonstrated lack of work ethic. I developed my own rule about writing tickets: leave the humans alone. So regular taxpayers got warnings. Scrotes, drunks, criminals and gangsters got tickets. And I’ve maintained that rule for more than thirty-four years of policing.
Over the Christmas seasons we in the Traffic Division participated in the drinking driver program. We would take out cars and set up roadblocks or cruise the Downtown Eastside looking for drunk drivers. When we made an arrest, we would summon the BAT Mobile (blood alcohol testing unit) and it would arrive with the breathalyzers to process the case. This van was quite cosy inside, having a fridge, soft seats and a sink, and on cold winter nights, in this warm living room setting with its comfortable seats and friends telling stories, what could be more pleasant?
While it was not unheard of in that era to enjoy a warming drink on a cold night, most understood the limits while on the job. Nordel did not. One cold night our crew was working perimeter control on a movie set when one of the production staff approached Sergeant Edwards. He pointed to Nordel, who appeared to be struggling to keep his balance, and said, “Listen, I got nothing against you guys having a drink or two, but that guy is so shit-faced he can’t even stand up.” I thought, thank God, somebody is finally going to do something about this idiot. Nordel was driven home to sober up. The next day we huddled around the Traffic desk, awaiting Nordel’s arrival because Edwards was ready to kill him, but Nordel never showed up for that shift. Or the next shift. He didn’t bother showing up for the whole week. When he finally returned to work, Edward’s fury had subsided. Nordel blamed the incident on the flu and booked off on paid sick leave.
But the most irritating part of Nordel’s personality was his arrogance. Once, when we were standing beside our bikes in Stanley Park, he told us how his class (one of the last classes to have come out of the Vancouver Academy) used to run around the seawall as part of the fitness program and how in those days the academy was a lot tougher than it is now. I looked up and down at his pear-shaped body and offered, “It couldn’t have been that tough. You made it.”
One time four of us were awaiting the arrival of a wagon for a slobbering drunk that Nordel had arrested. As the wagon driver filled out the paperwork, Nordel told us how he had made his big arrest. As he talked, the drunk edged farther and farther away and then finally spun around and ran off down the lane. While Nordel hesitated as if he couldn’t understand how something like this could happen, I said, “Hey Frank, your prisoner is escaping!” Nordel headed off in his riding boots, clompety-clomping after the desperado. And yes, he did catch him.
One weekday I was riding alone in the downtown core at about noon when a call came about a bank robbery a short distance away. Traffic was in gridlock, so I rode my bike up onto the sidewalk and was the first on scene. Over the course of time, bank procedures regarding teller protection, limiting cash on hand and quality surveillance recordings have meant that, these days, a bank is pretty much one of the last places a smart criminal would rob, but in those days there was a real cachet associated with bank robbers. They were at the top of the criminal food chain. In this case, I spoke to the victim, who was still in a state of shock, and I was given suspect details that fit half the men walking in the downtown core. Frustrated, I said, “Okay, what unique thing could you tell me about this guy that, if I walked outside right now, would let me pick him out of the crowd?” The teller thought for a moment, came out of the haze and said, “Oh. Well, he was walking with a really pronounced limp … almost like he needed a cane. And he wouldn’t be walking anyway because he got into a cab right out in front of the bank.” I broadcast the information, and because of the traffic chaos, the suspect was arrested a few blocks away. That really reinforced what I was learning about victims and the information they can provide: never assume that a victim is in shock and can offer only weak information. Always assume the victim has good, accurate information and keep asking until he or she gives it to you.
Welcome to Vancouver
One evening when I was riding alone, I set up radar in Stanley Park, where the only winners