northbound traffic that could slide down the hill and collide with our stopped offender. At the top of the hill he turned the police car to face us, but it began skating down the hill toward us in an uncontrollable slide. Standing at the driver’s door, I told the fellow, “You have to move right now.” No response as he continued to search in his glovebox for the car’s paperwork. Just seconds before the collision, Dureau hit his lights, which caused the two in the car to look to their right as the police car crashed into the passenger side door and blew the car right through the intersection.
As the ambulance arrived, the female passenger alleged she had been blinded and had to be carried from the wreck. As the ambulance drove away with the woman in the back, the husband, recognizing that he had made a mistake in not feigning injury like his wife, ran in the snow behind the departing ambulance, yelling, “Wait! Wait! I’m hurt, too.”
Throughout my career I would periodically remind Dureau about the incident: “Remember that Chinese woman you crippled on Cordova Street?” His response was, “She was Vietnamese.”
Back in the early 1980s the VPD had its own Parking Enforcement Squad, police officers who rode small, three-wheeled Cushman motorcycles all over the city and wrote parking tickets. (Since that time the squad has been replaced by a civilian detail that focuses on bylaw enforcement.) This Parking Enforcement Squad didn’t work Sundays, so early one Sunday morning, Dan Dureau, Christopher Shore and I booked out the Cushmans and rode them over to the PNE, where we chased each other all over the grounds in these ridiculous motorized clown cars. Then we lined up three abreast on Hastings Street at Boundary Road. We raced the engines (all thirty-five horsepower), and when the light changed, we floored it. I was approaching the crest of the hill at Renfrew Street when I smelled something burning. I careened over to the curb, stopped and got out to see that the brakes had somehow locked, causing a fire that had now spread to the fibreglass undercarriage. We borrowed a fire extinguisher from a taxi, put out the fire and had the burned-out hulk towed back to the station. In my defence, I have to say that at the time there was no actual rule or directive or policy that forbade members to book out the Cushmans. That policy was enacted immediately thereafter.
Traffic Division is either in your blood or it isn’t, and after six months Crowther bailed out. I had discovered that Traffic wasn’t in my blood either, but I couldn’t, in good conscience, leave the division after I had gone through all of the training. In fact, I just found the job to be too mundane, and I didn’t like the continuous negativity associated with giving out tickets all day long. In 1980 I applied for an instructor’s position at the British Columbia Police Academy. My wife and I were expecting a child, and I thought that the academy instructor’s position would offer some dayshift stability as well as giving me licence to shoot endless amounts of free ammunition from the widest possible variety of firearms.
There aren’t many secrets around the police department, and when I received a letter from the Justice Institute of British Columbia in the departmental mail, my Traffic squad knew what was up. As I opened the letter, “Dog Balls,” one of the more vocal members of the crew, said, “Is that your Thanks-but-no-thanks letter?” I read through the document and responded, “No, it’s my Thanks-but-thanks letter.” And I passed my letter of acceptance to the Academy around to the incredulous non-believers.
5
Police Academy Instructor, 1981–83
It’s Not a Bullet, It’s a Cartridge
I started work as a firearms instructor at the Justice Institute in the first week of January 1981. That someone would pay me to shoot and to teach others to shoot was a dream come true. Even now I enjoy shooting and a good day is one spent at the range. As a former police chief once commented, “A bad day at the range is better than the best day at the office.”
Teaching at the academy offered the opportunity to shoot a wide range of firearms. This one was a 9-mm. MAC-10 submachine gun.
My son Chris was born on January 26 of that year. I couldn’t have been happier.
Corporal Bill James was the other firearms instructor. His background was with Vancouver’s Emergency Response Team (who we were mandated to train), while mine was with Police Combat Shooting. An RCMP staff sergeant headed the Firearms Section, and the director of the academy itself was Chris Jones, a retired RCMP member. Though the RCMP didn’t participate in municipal training, they were qualified to give it. As the criteria for employment at the academy was only that you had to have police officer status, any Canadian police officer could apply for a job there. My experience was that the mix of instructors was a good thing. I think that in my pre-police college days, when the VPD ran its own academy, having only Vancouver instructors offered a more limited view of policing. But at the Justice Institute, I got to know some pretty outstanding people, including Larry Young, a corporal who taught fitness training at the Justice Institute, who died in 1987 in a shootout with an armed gunman.
At that time we were teaching instinctive shooting at metal targets at close range. To demonstrate how effective the technique was, I would lie on my back seven metres from the metal plate, extend my arms over my shoulder and—without using the sights—shoot a very small group of rounds into the centre of the target. Twenty-five years after I left the academy, when I was working a historical homicide file, I phoned the Delta Police Department to get some information. After I identified myself to the desk sergeant, there was a pause before he asked, “Is this the same Wayne Cope who taught me shooting at the Academy and shot bulls’ eyes while lying on his back by just pointing at the target?” I responded, “Yeah, that’s me.” I had no problem getting the information I needed for that file.
One morning I gave a demonstration to the class followed by some practice shooting. The recruits left for lunch and when they came back, they were told to return to the outdoor firing line, where the instructors would meet them shortly. As I came out to the line, Jim Bellevue, one of the more gregarious members of the class, was lying on his back with his gun out, pointing it at the target. When he saw me standing over him, he said, “The gun’s not loaded.” But even with an unloaded gun, what he was doing was strictly against range rules. As he rolled over to get up, I said, “If I thought that gun was loaded, I would have you terminated if it was the last thing I ever did.” I followed up with a few additional comments, and let it go at that.
More than twenty years later I was in an elevator full of police officers at 312 Main Street, the police station annex, when I looked over to see Bellevue staring at me.
He said, “You couldn’t do it, could you?”
“What was that?”
He responded, “You said you were going to get me fired if it was the last thing you ever did. You couldn’t do it, could you?”
I then realized that as he rolled over to get up, he hadn’t heard me preface my threat with: “If I thought that gun was loaded.” If our discourse in the elevator had been more civil, I would have straightened him out, but given his manner, I didn’t see the need to clarify what was actually said. As it turned out, a short time later Bellevue was fired (resigned under duress) because of an unrelated incident. I briefly considered meeting with him to let him know that I had gotten him fired after all, that it had just taken longer than anticipated.
One of my pet peeves at the Justice Institute was instructors who talked down to their students. My position was that, by sheer odds, half of the students were smarter than their instructors. The only reason these students didn’t lash out when being berated was because of their fear of the consequences.
One of the perks of teaching at the Academy was that instructors were allowed to travel to Ottawa to take training courses, usually once a year. I took the mandatory Instructional Techniques Course and then signed up for a Crisis Management Trainers Course. I had to have approval from the academy’s director, Chris Jones (who also happened to be a friend of mine), and he asked me why I wanted to take the course. “I don’t really think it’s your style,” he said. “It teaches how to teach other people how to talk suicidal people off bridges.” I said, “Four