Eastside Stories: Diary of a Vancouver Beat Cop

One year ago I stood before a bank of microphones, cameras and journalists in the lane behind the police station at 312 Main Street to announce the launch of Eastside Stories: Diary of a Vancouver Beat Cop.

In the months prior, a young woman named Ashley Machiskinic had fallen to her death from the window of a Downtown Eastside rooming house. Activists who insisted she must have been murdered had staged a sit-in at the Vancouver Police Department’s Main Street station. They engaged in a public campaign to suggest that police were doing little to investigate Ashley’s death, or to protect vulnerable women in the Downtown Eastside.

Other pressure groups had long complained that police in the Downtown Eastside did little more than pick on the poor, write petty tickets and arbitrarily arrest people for minor offences.

As a member of VPD’s Beat Enforcement Team, I knew this couldn’t be further from the truth.

I had seen police officers literally pick up and dust off Listerine drunks who were passed out in snow banks, and help them out of the cold when nobody else gave a damn.

I witnessed one police officer practically save the life of a man who had been stabbed in the neck during a knife fight, covering the gash with his bare hands to stop the man from bleeding to death.

I had personally lent my shoulder to people who had no-one left in the world to cry on.

Moreover, I’d seen the personal toll all this takes on the men and women who don the police uniform in the Downtown Eastside.

I wanted to help people understand what we actually do, the pressures we face and the frustrations we endure while policing one of Canada’s toughest beats. I wanted to give people a taste of what it’s like to be a police officer in the Downtown Eastside, and to help put a human face of the people who live and work here.

During the past 12 months this blog has introduced readers to a number of characters in the Downtown Eastside. There was Whistling Bernie Smith, the old-time beat cop who walked these streets in the 1970s, long before anyone had to worry about political correctness or the Charter of Rights.

We’ve met the man with three degrees and seven languages who wanders the streets of the Downtown Eastside, having lost his family, his job and his aspirations to a heroin addiction.

Then there was my favourite, the Ice Cream Man. As far as I know, he’s still fighting the good fight. And though I’ll probably never know for sure, I’d like to think I had something to do with his decision to get clean.

There are 18,000 people in the Downtown Eastside, and each one of them has their own story of heartbreak, tragedy and success. And while I’d love to stick around long enough to tell them all, it appears my time in the Downtown Eastside is coming to an end.

The Vancouver Police Department has decided to send me to a new sand box. They say it’s time to broaden my horizons. In two weeks I will be reluctantly re-assigned to a patrol squad in District 2 — the north-east quadrant of the city.

Some of my colleagues have encouraged me to continue my dispatches from my new post. I’d love to continue writing about my experiences in the Downtown Eastside, but I simply don’t believe I can do so with the quality and frequency you deserve.

While District 2 does technically include the Downtown Eastside, I will no longer be one of the foot soldiers on the Beat Enforcement Team. Instead,  I’ll be responding to calls from behind the wheel of a police car, and responsible for a larger, and more diverse area.

This blog is branded as the diary of a beat cop, and it would be wrong to suggest I am still slogging it out in the trenches when I am not.

That’s why I’ve decided that now is the time to pull the plug. It’s time to restore a little work-life balance and to focus my energy on some new endeavours.

Authoring this blog has been one of the most gratifying experiences I’ve had as a police officer. I’ve felt more fulfilled writing these stories than I did in nearly a decade working as a newspaper reporter (my previous career).

I am indebted to the Vancouver Police Department for allowing me the opportunity, and for taking such a hands-off approach. I was never told what to write or how to write it, and never once chided for wading in on sensitive or controversial topics.

I am even more indebted to everyone who took the time to read, to comment and to send me their personal stories during the past year. I’ve been touched and blown away by the passionate and heart-felt responses.

It has been a privilege.

— Steve

I’m bald.

Been this way for a decade — ever since I saw a picture of myself in the newspaper I used to work for and realized just how badly my little smoke-and-mirrors trick had failed.

I was 23 years old then, with a 40-year-old’s hairline. Up until that point I had feared becoming bald. But in trying to coif those last little whispies into something that resembled a hairstyle, I had become something much worse than bald. I was balding.

I decided that day to wrestle control of my failing folicles back from Mother Nature. After work I went straight to the barber shop and told him to shave it all.

It didn’t take him very long, and I could tell he was a little uncomfortable accepting payment for such an easy job.

The weekly trips to the barber soon became costly, so after about a month I went to Costco and picked up the Gigantor-size package of razers and shave gel.

I’ve never looked back.

I don’t miss my hair, and I certainly don’t miss the looks of pity I used to get as the grocery store clerk rang through my tubes of Dippity-Do.

And while being bald has its advantages, it also comes with a few drawbacks. For starters, I like to go running with my hat turned around backwards, which usually leaves a funny red semi-circle smack in the middle of my forehead if I forget to lather up with sunscreen.

Secondly, as a cop, I’m frequently forced to endure the laundry list of lame-o taunts from bad guys and looky-loos who think they can get my goat by calling me “chrome dome” or “cueball.”

Like last week. Four beat officers, including myself, were trying to help one of the locals who had fallen off the rails. A paranoid schizophrenic with a predilection for speed and cocaine, he’d gone AWOL from his addictions treatment centre. Now he was high, off his meds and in a foul mood.  We handcuffed him for our safety — and for his — while we waited for an ambulance to take him back to the psych ward.

It was quite the scene, which drew the usual crowd of cop critics and members of the iPhone paparazzi, convinced that the Downtown Eastside beat cops were trampling the rights of the downtrodden.

The man was amped up, so the paramedics asked us to escort them to the hospital. My partner climbed into the back of the ambulance to assist. As I crossed Hastings Street to my car so I could follow them to hospital, I heard one of the cop haters cat-call.

“Hey baldy. Use a crosswalk.”

I considered stopping to explain the situation, but I learned long ago that it’s useless trying to reason with an unreasonable person. And with four camera phones pointed my direction, I didn’t feel like being baited into a YouTube clip.

So, I ignored the taunt and carried on, feeling a little disappointed. I love a good one-liner as much as anyone, and here I had served one up like giant, glowing softball. It was just waiting to be hit out of the park. Still, all I got was another “Hey Baldy”  (this particular cop hater has since taken to calling me “skin head,” which is equally lame and unoriginal, yet definitely more offensive).

While I can’t do much about donut jokes and people who insist on saying “It wasn’t me” when I walk into bars, over the past decade I have certainly heard my share of original and unoriginal bald-guy barbs. Here’s a list of my top 5, intended to inspire something a  little more creative than “Hey baldy” the next time I run into the peanut gallery.

1. “Yo Powder. Use a crosswalk.”

2. “Hey Sinead O’Conner. Take the handcuffs off.”

3. “Constable. You look like a stick of roll-on deodorant.”

4. “Hey Telly Savalas/Mr. Clean/Lex Luther/Moby…”

5. “Excuse me. Aren’t you the guy from “The Scream?”

A young hipster in skinny jeans and a plaid shirt stopped me on West Hastings Street the other day.

“So, when are you gonna start arresting some of the drug dealers out here?” he asked.

It was a bit of a sarcastic comment, so I dished a little of the same back his way.

“Sure,” I said. “You point ’em out to me and I’ll go arrest them.”

We were standing outside the Burns Block, a century-old building and former low-income hotel that was recently converted into 30 “micro-lofts.” It’s part of the so-called gentrification of the Downtown Eastside.

This hipster had apparently just moved into the area, likely wanting to live in Vancouver’s edgiest neighbourhood, but perhaps not quite realizing his front door was just steps away from ground zero in the city’s open-air drug market.

‘They’re everywhere,” he said. “I walk down the street and all I get is people trying to sell me drugs.”

Despite the cheekiness of our initial exchange, I could tell he was genuine. I empathized with his frustration. He felt like the police were not doing enough to deal with the drug problem in the area. Looking around at the mess, I could see his frustration.

For decades, the seedy strip along Hastings Street has been a postcard for poverty. Once it was the commercial centre of a young city. Over time the legitimate businesses were replaced — first by pawnshops and beer parlours,  then by methadone clinics, shady corner stores and run-down rooming houses.

Now, after decades in the dumps, investment is slowly creeping back. Those tired old landmarks are being replaced with market housing, trendy eateries and a whole new population that’s heard about, but has likely never really seen what the Downtown Eastside was all about.

It’s made for a bit of a culture clash.

I’ve had more than a few unsuspecting twenty-somethings flag me down after having their iPhones ripped from their hands while their heads were buried in a text message. For them, it’s a $400 investment down the drain. For the thief who snatched it, it’s something they can sell for $30 and buy some rock.

And like the fellow I was now speaking to on West Hastings, I’ve also had my share of newcomers ask why the police aren’t doing more to arrest the drug dealers who litter the streets.

To understand why, one must first understand how this drug market works.

By and large, drugs are brought to the Downtown Eastside by young, non-addicted males in their 20s. They’re low and mid-level drug dealers, many of whom work for a larger organized crime groups.

I call them predatory drug dealers.

They strut around with hundreds, if not thousands of dollars wadded up in their jeans, while the people they profit from scrounge around from hoot to hoot, and from hit to hit.

I explained this to the young hipster, but it only fed his indignance.

“So why don’t you go arrest them all?” he asked again, not quite understanding.

I’d love to, but it’s not that easy.

Over the years these predatory drug dealers have learned to insulate themselves from the police. They rarely, if ever, actually do the drug dealing. Instead, they bring the drugs to the area, stash them in shady businesses or rooming houses, then “hire” addicts to do their dirty work.

It’s the addicts who take all the risk. They huddle in alcoves and stand in laneways, peddling flaps of heroin and chunks of crack cocaine for $10 or $20 apiece. Meantime, the predator directs traffic, collects the money, imposes arbitrary debts, and metes out beatings when those debts don’t get paid.

So if they’re taking all the risk, why do the addicts do it?

If they’re lucky, the addicted workers will get paid with enough drugs to feed their own habit for the day. If they’re unlucky, the cops will come along, arrest them and take them to jail. And when they get out the next day, it’s almost guaranteed they’ll be forced back to work in order to make up for the drugs and money they lost to the cops.

As a cop, I can walk around all day and do nothing but arrest addicts for flipping $10 rocks or passing a few flaps of heroin. One school of thought says I should, and on many days I tend to agree. But the other school of thought questions what, if anything, that would accomplish.

See, for every crack- or heroin-addicted drug dealer who gets busted and carted off to jail for the night, there’s a handful of others lined up to take their place. It seems like a never-ending cycle.

We arrested a young lady for selling heroin not long ago.  I asked her why she chooses to sell dope. Her answer was hard to argue with.

“I’m an addict. I’d rather sell drugs than sell my body.”

She told me she got paid $80 a day to sell drugs for one of those predatory dealers, and she feared she’d get beaten if she tried to quit. Still, it was better than standing on the street corner and getting into strangers’ cars.

One dealer Dan and I spoke with last week said he wished the police had busted him a long time ago. After 12 years schlepping dope, he’s now so far entrenched — and likely in debt — he doesn’t know if he’ll every get out of the business.

“They have all these programs for drug addicts…all these services to help drug addicts get off the streets. But they don’t have any programs to help drug dealers,” he told me.

I thought he must be joking, but he was dead serious. There is one program, I told him. It’s called jail.

“I wish you guys had put me in jail a long time ago,” the 30-year-old admitted.  “Maybe if I’d been charged a couple of times I would have gotten out of here.”

I wish someone had put him in jail, too. But in reality, it’s not that simple, especially for drug dealers who know how to play the game.

Knowing someone’s a drug dealer and proving it in a court of law are two entirely different things. And because they rarely handle the drugs, gathering enough evidence to lay a charge on these guys takes skill, resources and a whole lot of good timing.

Prosecutors are often reluctant to approve charges against someone who isn’t actually caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and even when charges get approved, convincing a judge to convict can be difficult.

Besides, the Downtown Eastside has been a mess for decades, and so long as there’s unlimited demand for drugs, there’s going to be people there to peddle them. Though I’d love to put these guys in jail, I’m not naive enough to think we can arrest our way out of this epidemic. If that were the case,  it would have been done a long time ago.

I explained all this to the hipster in the skinny jeans, hoping he’d understand that the problem wasn’t so black and white. I told him that the issues here — be it prostitution, poverty, drug dealing or disease — are complex ones with no quick fixes.

In the end he just shrugged his shoulders, cocked his eyebrows and gave me a look of resignation.

“What are you gonna do,” he asked rhetorically, as he turned toward the door of his apartment building.

I didn’t have an answer.

During night shift I often use my meal break to squeeze in a midnight run around the Stanley Park seawall. It’s a good way to burn off a little steam and forget about work for a while.

While I usually head out alone, tonight I convinced a co-worker to come along. It was nice to have a little company as I ticked off the miles. Unfortunately, it appears my friend and I got a little too caught up in conversation. While cruising along one of the trails that cuts through the park, we apparently failed to see that we were barrelling down on one Skunky McSkunkerson.

I saw him at the last second and tried to jump out of the way, but Skunky had already lifted his tail and let one rip. It was a direct hit.

Needless to say, I cleared out a good chunk of the office when I got back to work, and upon returning home was advised that I would be spending the night on the couch.

If anyone has a home remedy for skunk spray, please send it my way.

4,600 intravenous drug users live in the Downtown Eastside

587 drug injections happen daily at the Supervised Injection Site; this includes people who return multiple times a day

20 per cent of people in the Downtown Eastside are homeless

87 per cent of the population has Hepatitis C

200 people died of drug overdoses in the Downtown Eastside in 1993, the worst year on record

1997 was the year a public health emergency was declared in the DTES

270, 000 tax dollars were given to VANDU – the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users – last year. VANDU advocates, among other things, for “the right to obtain, prepare and inject drugs, and to be intoxicated on drugs”

49 per cent of police contacts in the Downtown Eastside are believed to be with someone who has a mental illness

80 per cent of Downtown Eastside residents have been previously incarcerated

1 year is the new mandatory minimum jail sentence a repeat offender who is caught selling drugs; 2 years if they’re near a school or caught selling to youth

Sources: VANDU, Supreme Court of Canada, Vancouver Police Department, Vancouver Coastal Health, NAOMI Project, Vancouver Courier, Canadian Department of Justice