Over the weekend, a guy got stabbed in the leg in front of Carnegie Center, where a swarm of people sell drugs or just hang out. The guy appeared to have been stabbed in a major artery.
A Carnegie Security guard, a tall guy with white hair, was helping the paramedic by holding the torque on the injured man’s leg.
Then a rookie Vancouver Police officer comes along. He tells the plain clothes security guard to back off. But the Security guard was preventing the guy from bleeding to death, so he tells the cop that he works on security.
The cop asks where the guy was stabbed. The security guard told him that it was by the women’s washroom, although the trail of blood made it obvious where he had been stabbed. There is an underground women’s washroom near the Carnegie front steps; women say it’s a clean washroom and a City worker sits down there to make certain nobody shoots up or causes trouble.
"The cop pulls out his gun," said a Carnegie regular in amazement,"and goes down to the women’s washroom." As if anybody would get away with hiding in the women's washroom with so many people standing around, he added.
Another guy from the neighborhood said, “That cop has been watching too much tv.”
A Carnegie Security guard, a tall guy with white hair, was helping the paramedic by holding the torque on the injured man’s leg.
Then a rookie Vancouver Police officer comes along. He tells the plain clothes security guard to back off. But the Security guard was preventing the guy from bleeding to death, so he tells the cop that he works on security.
The cop asks where the guy was stabbed. The security guard told him that it was by the women’s washroom, although the trail of blood made it obvious where he had been stabbed. There is an underground women’s washroom near the Carnegie front steps; women say it’s a clean washroom and a City worker sits down there to make certain nobody shoots up or causes trouble.
"The cop pulls out his gun," said a Carnegie regular in amazement,"and goes down to the women’s washroom." As if anybody would get away with hiding in the women's washroom with so many people standing around, he added.
Another guy from the neighborhood said, “That cop has been watching too much tv.”
14 comments:
A woman I spoke to said she was there in the Ladies' Room when guy came in. She looked at him and said: "Is that a switchblade in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"
Now, as I understand it, the fellow was a rookie policeman who was told to work undercover. He felt that to do so by himself would lead to his fellow policemen ridiculing him; so he went looking for a girlfriend, thinking the likeliest place to find women would be in a place called "Ladies' Room."
The rookie, maybe not the brightest badge on the beat, also learned that "undercover" didn't mean what he assumed it did.
Hey, wait a minute! How come I always get accused of making up this stuff?
In the pursuit of further excellence in journalism, I tracked down the policeman in question, and this is his side of the story about his daring rush into the ladies' toilet:
"I was looking for a poker," he said, "The chips were down, so I figured I'd try a straight flush against a full house. First lever I pushed, I hit the jackpot."
I asked about the perpetrator. The rooky said: "I was getting my man while I was getting my woman."
And they call him a rooky!
What?! No, I'm not making this up. Honest. It really happened just that way.
You make me laugh dag. Should ask that cop if he's been watching Cagney & Lacey re-runs. But come to think of it, Cagney never found her man in the women's can.
I didn't know the name of the security guard with the white hair but I'm told it is Richard. He's not a bad guard actually. He doesn't have a record of frivolously barring people, like some of the guards at Carnegie.
I suspect one can easily find a security guard at the Carnegie Centre without having to ask; and now, thanks to this incredible piece of investigative journalism we can all rest assured that should one ever need a police officer one will be found in the ladies room. I think I'll check, just to be sure. No, I'm not a pervert, this is research.
Hey, why do I get the feeling people aren't taking me seriously?
oh, for pete's sake, you mean your NOT serious?! Shucks, taken again. ;-)
Whoa, with a name like that you must have gotten a lot of teasing in school.
Let me make a modest proposal, though, which is why I return yet again to this topic: I've been ribbing a young policeman for a day now, and I haven't credited him at all with the fact that we faced what could have been a serious threat to his life, i.e. a man who just tried to murder someone on a city street. Yes, the drawn gun seems a bit melodramatic, especially from the comfort of this room with the funny looking walls. Spongy or something. Nevermind. The point is the cop on his own chased a guy who had no disinclination to kill. I say that takes some balls.
It takes balls, but there's the problem of that being the wrong thing to have in the room he went into.
Doh!
I mean, thanks, fella.
Maybe next time someone goes berserk with a weapon on a crowded street on anywhere else, I'll want that cop coming to the rescue.
G.T., that's one time I'm not kidding. And sorry about the name. Harsh. I'm sure you're big enough to handle it.
I made a typographical error that perhaps revels my sympathy for the policeman: "...the fact that we faced...." No, I didn't face any such thing. He did it all of his own. The letters h and w are not even close on the keyboard. I must have been dreaming of myself as a hero. Maybe I watch too much television.
Kidding aside, aren't there procedures to follow for police in such circumstances, didn't the RCMP officer in Hay River just get killed acting alone?
Any more details about the who dunnit and how?
Inquiring minds DO want to know. There is a problem, though, in that asking too many questions can lead to unintended harmful consequences.
We have in our blessed time a means of breaching the gap between those who know and those who could know, unlike times previous when only the highly privileged had access to the means of public communication. People can, and do, write for the public. There are those who jealously guard their past privileges as arbiters of public knowledge. They still wield power in their fiefs. Those who would write honestly for the public must still tread warily among those who walk softly and carry big pens.
How do the people avoid the consequences of the gnostic obscurantists, those who hoard and grudgingly disseminate knowledge to the people according to the party line? One must rely on whispers in darkened ally-ways and brief exchanges in dim cafes. Anyone reliant on $0.80 per hour in food stamps for subsistence who charges against another making $104.000.00 per year in cash (that we know of) is likely to find himself outside the system -- in a bad way. But this is not the end of the story.
Sherlock Holmes, smart as he might well have been, didn't rely only on his powers of deduction: he relied very much on "The Baker Street Irregulars" to find for him information and leads of all sorts.
So consider this: Don't "go to the media." You, dear reader, ARE the media. All that you see and hear and find out can go through the grinding-mill of verification till in its pristine purity it ends up on a blog such as this. You, citizen, are the power of the Press. But be careful with such power lest you in turn crush others who are now crushed in the press.
Yes, I too want to know more about the cop who went storming into the ladies' room with a gun drawn. What if he'd actually found a killer inside? Would he have fired his weapon? But one has to accept that the cop is likely reluctant to talk to the blogosphere at this time, calling cold on a hot-blooded fellow that he obviously is. It takes a network of thinking and intelligent people to make a system of information available to the people. There are those whose current monopoly on the "news" who will engage in any petty and spiteful and dirty trick they can find to destroy the peoples' democracy we have in the making. They'll trot out weeping women, men who have "seen it all" and those who are simply strident fanatics in favor of the powers that reward them. One must organize the collection of news clandestinely, as revolutionaries that you most certainly are.
Privacy is not what it was five years ago. We can and do know things now that were hidden from us before. That's both good and bad. Regardless, such is the way of our current world, and it becomes moreso now. We can take good advantage of this situation by organizing intelligently a news service to bring not more control over the people but more freedom through knowledge. It takes people interested and dedicated to effort for that specific purpose.
Who is the cop, who is the victim of the unknown person who stabbed him? Find out. Find out by talking to a policeman. Open up to your own community as a positive force for good rather than as a demanding povertarian seeking only ever increasing power to micro manage the lives of the infantalised. Meet outside the area where your efforts will be unnoticed so you can prepare for a revolution in Human freedom. Acting alone might not get you killed, but it could end up being equally fatal if you are, like Simpson, cast out with nowhere to go for daily needs simply because the povertarians don't like you. Either way, dead is dead, and that is a bad thing, unnecessary and counter-productive.
Meet somewhere and form a network of news-gatherers who will challenge the monopoly of ideologues who suck up the misery of the people for the sake of money and cloaks of righteousness to cover their innate ugliness. Go out and talk to each other and make a news service for the area. Beat the bastards at their own game.
No kidding.
"Meet somewhere and form a network of news-gatherers..."
William has a perfectly good, albeit somewhat lonely, discussion forum he has keyboarded his knuckles to the bone to set up for beginning just such an endeavour. Just needs the people to get on it and get it on.
Or...?
I'm in sympathy to an extent with the concept of blogging as social activism, but only as a beginning of the real work required to form an activist reconstruction of a covenant of Humanness now lacking, ruled instead by gnostic elites, if you will.
I'm an occasional interloper here, not being any integral part of the people who form the proto-network needed to create a renewed concept of community. I'm an outsider, and the issues of concern to this community are similar to mine but not overlapping. We share a need to reinvent a covenant of community and responsibility to individuals as free beings, and I can't do that with any validity within the Carnegie mileau. I'm not attuned to the needs of the group. That will require those who are committed to the nature of the people and their direct lives. It means one must meet those people and be open to giving of oneself personally in time and energy. I do so each Thursday evening at a location open to all but in essence restricted to intellectuals who are concerned with theoretical epistemology as opposed to praxis. We're boring.
But, to make my point clearly, I see a need for a blog, Simpson's or others, as a beginning place from which to organize personal meetings. The Internet is wonderful, but it doesn't make life real. People meeting face-to-face is the only way to do that.
Out of character and place, I'll offer to host a meeting of anyone who wishes to form an informal group of irregular news-gatherers.
Meet me, if you will, at McDonald's on Main and Terminal Saturday evening at 7:00 pm to discuss the idea. I'll wear a blue scarf in solidarity with our comrades of the French Revolution Bleue, a group some might find objectionably "conservative." You won't need to agree with my vision of reality to come and have some coffee and talk among yourselves about organizing a network of truth-gatherers. You have the freedom to talk, and you have the freedom to associate. you can take it all to a new plane to make your own lives your own property for your own ends, and one way to do so is to assert your independence from the minders at the government level who do such great harm for the sake of their own vanity, not to mention $104.000.00 per year (that we know of.)
Coffee at McD. at 7 on Saturday night. Show up, meet people, talk it over, maybe have some fun. Then blog.
Saturday night sounds good. Main and Terminal, I presume. Thanks for the invite. See you there.
I'll have my zipper fixed by then and I'll see you there.
Only a cynic could fail to laugh at that Dag, see you there
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