Vancouver Blue
Vancouver Blue
A Life Against Crime
Wayne Cope
Copyright © 2015 Wayne Cope
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0
All photographs from the author’s collection
Edited by Betty Keller
Cover design by Shed Simas
Text design by Mary White
Printed and bound in Canada
Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55017-699-5 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-55017-700-8 (ebook)
Note: Most names used in this book, as well as some identifying details, have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. Other names have been changed to avoid adding to the notoriety of convicted criminals.
To Dawna, who thinks that some of my stories are as entertaining as I do, and who encouraged me to commit them to paper.
To Marge—I concede. It may have been your idea.
To Shelley Fralic for helping me turn a collection of anecdotes into a book.
To the Vancouver Police Department—it’s been an honour and a privilege working with 89 percent of you (see Chapter 7, The Idiot Factor).
To Mrs. Brandon and my grade two class at Grandview Elementary School.
To my friend Victor the Knife from kindergarten—if that was you we pulverized with tear gas outside the Yaletown Postal Depot or blasted with the beanbag gun on Granville Street, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you. It’s been more than forty years.
Introduction
The Empress Hotel beer parlour, or “the Emp,” is a Downtown Eastside watering hole located across the lane from the Main Street police station. Before the Vancouver Police Union built the Police Athletic Club two blocks farther north on Alexander Street, the Emp was the place for police officers to go when their shifts were over, as it offered discreet card tables for a friendly game and “last call” only meant that the staff was about to bar the door to new customers rather than require patrons to leave.
In April 1979 I had been on the job for four years and, after my shift, was at the Emp with six or seven fellow Traffic Division motorcycle trainees, drinking beer and solving all the problems of the world. Elvis had died two years earlier, and after heated debate I had achieved consensus with the group that Johnny Cash was now the world’s greatest living musical entertainer. Having resolved that issue, one of the crew asked me if I had any thoughts about what I wanted to do with my career over the course of the next thirty years. I answered, “Absolutely. I would like to ride the motorcycles for a while, walk the beat, work undercover, continue shooting with the pistol team, be part of a surveillance unit, work as a dog master and investigate murders. I’ve got no aspirations of becoming commissioned as an officer, and if I retire as a sergeant in charge of a good squad of people, that would be just fine with me.” He seemed surprised and said, “You sure seem to have it all worked out.” I responded, “I don’t know about having it all worked out, but I don’t want to look back thirty years from now and say, “That was sure boring.”
It was rarely boring.
I enjoy experiencing new things and doing what others haven’t done. I got my scuba licence when I was fifteen years old and have dived the Pacific West Coast, the Great Barrier Reef, the Cozumel Wall, the Chaak Tun Cenote in the Yucatan, the Gulf of California, Bali and the Canary Islands. At the time of this writing I have been on a pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s grave at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris five times, run with the bulls in Pamplona on twelve occasions and, at fifty-five below zero, witnessed Lance Mackey and his dog-sled team win the Iditarod in Nome for the third consecutive time. Each adventure has not much to do with the other, but perhaps they offer insight into the type of person who has written this book.
Ever since my time in Mrs. Brandon’s grade two class at Grandview Elementary School, I wanted to be a policeman and scuba diver.
The three founding principles of policing have remained the same since 1829, when Sir Robert Peel developed the metropolitan model in London, England. First, the police are accountable to the public. Second, the effectiveness of a police department is not measured by the number of arrests made, but by an absence of crime. Third, the most important part of establishing a credible police service is establishing and maintaining the public trust.
1
In the Beginning
Meet the Family
My father, Alfred Cope, was from Winnipeg and left home at fifteen to work in the northern mines of Churchill. He had only completed grade six, but when joking about his education, he would say that he had done half of grade twelve. When meeting people who were from Manitoba, he would bait them with: “There is only one good road in Winnipeg. That’s the road heading out of town.” His father, Albert Cope, was a wounded veteran of the First World War, and his uncle Llewellyn had been killed near Elverdinghe Chateau in Flanders on August 24, 1917.
After working in the mines, Dad rode the rails to the West Coast, where he took a job as a sawyer at the Hammond Mill in Pitt Meadows. His nickname was “Cash” because he always carried a large wad of bills to negotiate any spontaneous deal that came his way. Never one for maintaining his property, whenever something broke or needed replacing, he would comment, “Oh, well, it’s only money, and I got lots.”
My mother, Margaret Sweet, was born in Vernon, BC. Her father
