Coming back to Vancouver a week after the riot, I found myself in a city that can’t stop talking about how such an outbreak could have happened. The stories in the media just won’t go away, to the point where one Vancouver Sun columnist actually wrote a column saying people should stop writing columns about this endless topic.
From the perspective of someone who has the advantage of exclusively sober second-hand thoughts, here’s my take.
First, I don’t think Tourism Vancouver has anything to worry about. Reaction in small-town Colorado, when I told people I was from Vancouver, was consistently, “I’m so sorry to hear about your riot.” No one said, “That settles it. Vancouver is no longer a world-class city and I won’t go there anymore.”
It will have zero impact on tourism, except perhaps positively raising people’s curiosity about our city and how something so foul could happen in a city so fair.
It seems the few monsters among us and the hidden monsters within us both rose up that night – a few nasty bad people and many nasty good people. What united them, besides the (We Were All) Canucks, was young male boozing in crowded spaces with too few cops. It wasn’t a natural extension of the Downtown Eastside’s chronic lawlessness and rampant street-drug use. It wasn’t the boredom and alienation of living in Vancouver’s “sick society” and not being able to afford a house or even a lousy $1,500 ticket to the final game. It wasn’t (just) social media fanning the flames of those burning cars.
I recall former Vancouver police chief Jamie Graham being asked, if there was one thing he could do to reduce crime in Vancouver, what would it be?
“We could lay off two-thirds of my force if there was no alcohol in our society,” he answered.
For Game 7, the warning of a noon liquor curfew came a day early. That meant lineups around the block before noon and the biggest day ever for at least one downtown liquor store. By 2 p.m. yobs in Canucks jerseys and backward baseball hats were high-fiving startled lawyers walking to the courthouse.
“There was already a mood in the air that anything goes,” one friend remarked, fearful for what might come later.
By the time the police came on duty at 4:30 p.m., the main downtown viewing area was so packed with people, many openly drinking, that police penetration was almost impossible. The police couldn’t even get their own cars out of the way.
The police chief for some reason won’t say how many VPD personnel were on duty that night (probably around 300 before reinforcements were called in from suburban forces). The mayor wants to know, too, but says he can’t force the chief to tell him, even though the mayor is chair of the police commission that governs the police force. What?
City Hall’s clampdown on the police budget precluded the police from having all the resources they wanted for that day. The city got complacent after the successes of the Olympics and the previous games.
When the unravelling of civil behaviour really got going in the big-screen viewing area, the police were scrambling to change into their riot gear and then wondering where in the 20-square block area of mayhem they should start. They didn’t have a sound system able to order that big a crowd to disperse. By the time they got out the tear gas, it was way too late.
The first line of responsibility has to rest on the goons who did the damage.
But really, if the city, the CBC and the police are going to set up an event where 150,000 people, many of them drunk, are gathered in one place with nothing to do after a violent game ends unhappily, they ought to be able to protect innocent people and adjacent property.
Someone in authority has to take responsibility for that.