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BLACK-SHEEP COMMENTARIES by SHOOTINGS NOT ACCEPTABLE August 15, 2007 IN the early hours of the 4th of August four bullets ripped through the front window of The Edge Bistro in North Vancouver’s laid-back Edgemont Village. I was unaware of the shooting until midmorning when I stopped in at the Chevron station across from the restaurant and saw police officers quietly walking about a blocked-off section of the street. “What movie are they shooting?” I asked the attendant. With raised eyebrows and a look of disbelief over my vacuous question he pointed toward the restaurant saying, “It’s not a movie set, it was a shooting.” My head snapped around and there they were – the criminal’s calling card – four sinister bullet holes. Moments later I headed up the highway to Abbotsford to speak to a group of mature students majoring in criminology. In my opening remarks I reminded the students that the paramount duty of government at all levels is to ensure public safety; that the four-bullet-hole calling card clearly established the degree of contempt that heavily armed gangsters have for our under-strength police forces. Five days later on Thursday Aug. 9, at 4:30 a.m., two barbarous, cowardly gangsters burst into the Fortune Happiness restaurant in the 600 block of east Broadway in Vancouver and gunned down eight people, killing two of them. It was a real-life gangland execution. It was street justice capital punishment. Later that day the Canadian Press put out a report on the shooting quoting Vancouver’s deputy chief constable Bob Rich: “This is one of the worst shootings that we’ve had in Vancouver. “A gun a day is seized from city streets. “We are very concerned that Vancouver is dealing with situations where there is a lot more handguns, high-quality handguns, a lot more automatic weapons, …machine pistols, other kinds of guns like that, that would allow for this kind of shooting where this amount of rounds were fired quickly by two gunmen – it is extremely concerning for us. “Obviously senseless shootings like this are devastating for families, friends of victims and also for the community, for the fear that it raises.” But it was Detective Doug Spencer of the Vancouver Police Department who put the savagery at the Fortune Happiness restaurant into a chilling context. In an Aug. 9 interview with National Post reporter Andy Ivens, Spencer provided a short-list of local gangs and characterized their psychopathic behaviour and the deadly threat they pose to each other and to us. Here’s the list: “United Nations, Hells Angels, Indo-Canadian, Vietnamese, Independent Soldiers, Latin-American, and Big Circle Boys.” After “Ten years of riding herd on Vancouver’s violent street gangs” Spencer left the gang squad to work on the youth squad. “We’d catch these ‘gangsters’ and, of course, the courts would give them nothing. I thought it’s better to be proactive and try to get to some of the youth and enlighten these kids. They really don’t know what they’re getting into. They see the nice cars and the money and all the instant glamour, but they don’t realize that somebody is trying to kill you to get it off you. Ivens reported that Spencer is fed up with judges – particularly in Provincial Court – where comparatively lenient sentencing for violent crime is sending the message to gangsters in other provinces to come to British Columbia. “Guys will get six months for serious assaults or drug trafficking here. In Alberta, they’d get six years. That makes them want to come here” Spencer said. The Vancouver Province story on the murderous rampage at the Fortune Happiness restaurant listed 13 other shooting incidents in the Lower Mainland during the past two years including an October 2006 shooting at the International Plaza complex on Marine Drive in North Vancouver, and a November 2006 exchange of gunfire at Capilano Road and the Upper Levels Highway. Official response to the Fortune Happiness slaughter was typically ambivalent. Vancouver’s outgoing chief constable Jamie Graham told the Vancouver Sun that “Vancouver is a safe city. We work hard to ensure that it stays that way. But you can’t ignore the magnitude of the crime that happened yesterday.” According to the Sun, Graham went on to say the attack clearly showed how dangerous Vancouver had become because of the influx of illegal firearms: “This is not the Vancouver of the 1950s. Vancouver has a serious gun problem.” Mayor Sam Sullivan planted himself firmly astride the fence of indecision when he said “I do believe guns in the city are a real problem. This is a shocking crime. But I can tell you our city is very safe, and these kinds of incidents are, thankfully, rare.” In the immediate aftermath of Vancouver’s worst-ever case of gangland murder the editorial boards of our newspapers said not one word. The void was filled on Aug 11 by a common sense letter to the editor of the Sun from Vancouverite Bill Rosmus. Here’s part of the Rosmus “editorial.” “The police and, by extension, city council and the mayor, seem to be implying that everything is OK and not a problem when they tell us that this mass shooting was ‘targeted.’ Almost every time we have heard about a shooting lately, we have been told, ‘It’s OK, the victims were targeted.’ Well it is definitely not OK. This attitude sets the stage for a dangerous malaise to set in. … “Implying that the streets are safe and everything will be OK because ‘this was a targeted shooting’ is the worst sort (of response). Soon all street punks will think it is OK to carry a gun and use it as they see the weapons being used more and more, and the police either not having the capability … or worse, the motivation to do anything about it. This should not happen, and it is not acceptable. “Stop telling us, ‘It’s OK, it was a targeted shooting.’ Tell us you caught whoever did it, and that it won’t happen again. And make sure of it,” he wrote. Chief Graham was absolutely correct in saying that Vancouver today is not the Vancouver of the 1950’s. My adult life began in the 1950s. Through all the years since then, I have witnessed and agonized over the increasing inability of the criminal justice system to protect society. I have seen a mounting affront to victims of crime perpetrated by the judicial and penitentiary systems as they obstinately engage in so-called restorative justice and nonsensical attempts at rehabilitation. In heedless fashion they send predictably dangerous convicts among us on conditional sentences, probation and parole. Public safety, once a reality, is fast becoming a legal abstraction. By such reckless disregard for public safety they have sown the winds of criminality and will reap a whirlwind of wrath from victims of crime and a hailstorm of well-founded condemnation from ordinary law-abiding Canadians. Wallace
G Craig -
wallace-gilby-craig@realjustice.ca |
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