Police & Bureaucracy
Today I got on the Skytrain at Main Street, and this totally drunk pair was squished up against me. At first I thought “oh, how irritatingly almost entertaining. Two strangers who got afternoon drunk downtown making the trip back to Surrey (read: Scarborough, for those in Toronto). The two of them were blasted. It was 5:15 PM, aka rush hour in a city with TERRIBLE sober drivers, even.
Then the man said, “my car is parked at Patterson; I’m not too drunk to drive, so we’ll get off there.” That was right before I got off at Nanaimo.
[[Unfortunately, there is a culture of acceptance about impaired driving amongst some of my friends, so for now just pretend that I am talking about an abstract crime being committed, that could potentially harm someone.]]
Anyway, in my opinion, impaired driving is considered by the police to be a “substantive crime in progress”, as per their website (and common sense), which warrants a call to 9-1-1. Call 9-1-1? You bet I did.
After I quickly explained the situation, the woman on the other end of the phone informed me that because Patterson Station is in Burnaby, I should have called the Burnaby Police. Sorry. That was ignorance on my part: I assumed that because in pre-amalgamated Toronto, we had one police force, it was the same in Greater Vancouver. Anyway, I was kindly transferred to the Burnaby Police after wasting precious minutes. I was naively that maybe buddy could have been stopped before getting into his car, despite Patterson being like an 8 minute ride from Nanaimo.
Burnaby Police than said “oh, well let us put you through to the TRANSIT POLICE”
Oh! The transit police! Fantastic. So the I was put on hold for 3 minutes. During that time, I found a transit security officer, who did dispatch somebody to Patterson. By that point a good 10 minutes had passed, and I would assume that the drunk pair had by then gotten off the SkyTrain station.
You know what slowed down the process of the security guy dispatching someone to Patterson? He kept asking me for the number of the train I was on. I DON’T REGULARLY KEEP TABS ON THE NUMBER OF THE TRAIN CARS OR BUSES I AM ON! If I say “I got off the train _ minutes ago”, then I would expect that an employee of said transit company could deduce about how long it would be until passengers from said train would reach Patterson Station.
I don’t know a lot about municipal policing in the GVA, so I could be saying something that makes me look really stupid and naive. I know a lot of people say “fuck the police” and that cops don’t get things done, but a big problem, as I have illustrated, is so clearly bureaucratic, and not due to a lack of motivation on the individual or group’s part.
The amount of time that it takes for a couple of departments from the same urban area to say “that’s not my problem; please go elsewhere” puts people at risk. Secondly, I would hope that in a situation like this, it would be simple for a police officer to contact the alternate municipality’s department and advise them to dispatch some police to the area where the crime is most likely to occur. I THINK that the police at the other municipality’s department would trust the judgment of another police officer.
Another issue that is raised here, is at what point would a police officer say “oh, shit, this is a pretty serious crime, so I had better try to get the ball rolling, even though this is not in my jurisdiction”
That is a.. Now I am going to write a real essay, for school, that at least somebody will take consideration of.
