I saw it veer toward a scruffy-looking, long-haired character standing about fifteen yards in front of me in an apparent attempt to hit him. The intended target raised a pistol and fired three times as the car swerved past, barely missing him and continuing down the lane. I dropped the bike and drew my revolver, pointing it at the shooter, who had his back to me. I called out, “City Police! Drop that gun,” and the man turned toward me with his hands at his sides. I warned him two more times, thinking that he appeared to be in a state of shock. Finally calming, he yelled, “RCMP! RCMP!” Again I ordered him to drop his gun, which he refused to do. Just then I noticed a Vancouver Drug Squad sergeant running toward me from the south. He was a friend of mine and a fellow member of the Vancouver Police Pistol Team. He called out, “Wayne, he’s RCMP!” before going over to relieve the shooter of his firearm. When I returned to the station, the story was all over. The corporal asked, “Why didn’t you shoot him?” The first reason was that when the shooter opened fire, he crouched and used a two-handed grip on the pistol. The average drug addict would not normally have that kind of training and discipline, so it clicked immediately that something was wrong with the scene. The second reason was that I was a pretty good shot, and I had drawn and aimed at a shooter who had his gun at his side; at point-blank range I was confident that I had control of the situation. Besides, he had already missed the driver of the car with his three shots.
For Number Five I pulled over a westbound vehicle on Georgia Street, directly across from the Hudson’s Bay, for a routine traffic stop. It was rush hour so there were well over seventy-five people on the north sidewalk waiting for the bus, and now they were all watching me. The car stopped without incident, I put down the kickstand of the Harley and leaned it over. That’s when the kickstand snapped, and the bike went onto its side with me on it. I got up, dusted myself off, walked up to the driver and told him to get lost. I rode the Harley back to the city works yard, where I leaned it up against a wall to await repair.
I had a few more accidents while in Traffic Division. Fortunately, in this instance, I was driving a car, not a bike. Westbound on Cordova in the curb lane, I was stopped at a red light beside a tractor-trailer. With the light still red, the driver of the tractor suddenly decided to make a right turn, crushing the police car against a power pole. As I climbed over Crowther, I hit the lights and siren before the two of us spilled onto the sidewalk. This driver actually advised me that the accident was my fault because I was in his blind spot.
Although the members of Traffic Division ride our bikes in the sun, rain and sleet, we don’t ride in the snow. In one of the few blinding snowstorms Vancouver has ever had, Dan Dureau and I were westbound on Cordova Street in one of the big Traffic Division battlewagons. Dureau was driving, and it was slim pickings for tickets when we noticed a vehicle driving toward us with one headlight on. Dureau pulled a U-turn behind it and put on the lights and siren. The vehicle pulled over without incident but stopped right in the middle of an intersection where the northbound traffic would be approaching down a very steep hill. I got out and approached the driver, an Asian male who apparently spoke no English. His wife was the passenger. I told the driver several times to pull forward because any northbound vehicle would never be able to stop in the ice and slush. Exasperated, Dureau got back into the police car and drove it up the hill, where he meant to block northbound traffic that could slide down the hill and collide with our stopped offender. At the top of the hill he turned the police car to face us, but it began skating down the hill toward us in an uncontrollable slide. Standing at the driver’s door, I told the fellow, “You have to move right now.” No response as he continued to search in his glovebox for the car’s paperwork. Just seconds before the collision, Dureau hit his lights, which caused the two in the car to look to their right as the police car crashed into the passenger side door and blew the car right through the intersection.
As the ambulance arrived, the female passenger alleged she had been blinded and had to be carried from the wreck. As the ambulance drove away with the woman in the back, the husband, recognizing that he had made a mistake in not feigning injury like his wife, ran in the snow behind the departing ambulance, yelling, “Wait! Wait! I’m hurt, too.”
Throughout my career I would periodically remind Dureau about the incident: “Remember that Chinese woman you crippled on Cordova Street?” His response was, “She was Vietnamese.”
Back in the early 1980s the VPD had its own Parking Enforcement Squad, police officers who rode small, three-wheeled Cushman motorcycles all over the city and wrote parking tickets. (Since that time the squad has been replaced by a civilian detail that focuses on bylaw enforcement.) This Parking Enforcement Squad didn’t work Sundays, so early one Sunday morning, Dan Dureau, Christopher Shore and I booked out the Cushmans and rode them over to the PNE, where we chased each other all over the grounds in these ridiculous motorized clown cars. Then we lined up three abreast on Hastings Street at Boundary Road. We raced the engines (all thirty-five horsepower), and when the light changed, we floored it. I was approaching the crest of the hill at Renfrew Street when I smelled something burning. I careened over to the curb, stopped and got out to see that the brakes had somehow locked, causing a fire that had now spread to the fibreglass undercarriage. We borrowed a fire extinguisher from a taxi, put out the fire and had the burned-out hulk towed back to the station. In my defence, I have to say that at the time there was no actual rule or directive or policy that forbade members to book out the Cushmans. That policy was enacted immediately thereafter.
Traffic Division is either in your blood or it isn’t, and after six months Crowther bailed out. I had discovered that Traffic wasn’t in my blood either, but I couldn’t, in good conscience, leave the division after I had gone through all of the training. In fact, I just found the job to be too mundane, and I didn’t like the continuous negativity associated with giving out tickets all day long. In 1980 I applied for an instructor’s position at the British Columbia Police Academy. My wife and I were expecting a child, and I thought that the academy instructor’s position would offer some dayshift stability as well as giving me licence to shoot endless amounts of free ammunition from the widest possible variety of firearms.
There aren’t many secrets around the police department, and when I received a letter from the Justice Institute of British Columbia in the departmental mail, my Traffic squad knew what was up. As I opened the letter, “Dog Balls,” one of the more vocal members of the crew, said, “Is that your Thanks-but-no-thanks letter?” I read through the document and responded, “No, it’s my Thanks-but-thanks letter.” And I passed my letter of acceptance to the Academy around to the incredulous non-believers.
5
Police Academy Instructor, 1981–83
It’s Not a Bullet, It’s a Cartridge
I started work as a firearms instructor at the Justice Institute in the first week of January 1981. That someone would pay me to shoot and to teach others to shoot was a dream come true. Even now I enjoy shooting and a good day is one spent at the range. As a former police chief once commented, “A bad day at the range is better than the best day at the office.”
Teaching at the academy offered the opportunity to shoot a wide range of firearms. This one was a 9-mm. MAC-10 submachine gun.
My son Chris was born on January 26 of that year. I couldn’t have been happier.
Corporal Bill James was the other firearms instructor. His background was with Vancouver’s Emergency Response Team (who we were mandated to train), while mine was with Police Combat Shooting. An RCMP staff sergeant headed the Firearms Section, and the director of the academy itself was Chris Jones, a retired RCMP member. Though the RCMP didn’t participate in municipal training, they were qualified to give it. As the criteria for employment at the academy was only that you had to have police officer status, any Canadian police officer could apply for a job there. My experience was that the mix of instructors was a good thing.
