News Article: April 14, 2004
Section: News
Outlet: Vancouver Courier
Bylin: Scott Deveau
Title: Street patrol
Page: 1 (Front)
Date: 2004-04-14
Bars have turned to people like Don Robinson of Genesis Security to help end the street mayhem since closing hours were extended to 4 a.m. last summer
Shortly before 2 a.m. on a Friday night, walking down Granville mall with Don Robinson--a monster of a man at 6'3" 270 lbs.--you get a sobering view of the chaos that comes midway through a night of partying.
Robinson, a supervisor at Genesis Security Inc., is just saying how quiet the night has been when the flashing lights of a police car parked on the sidewalk across the street come into sight.
Another cruiser, a paddy wagon and a handful of officers questioning witnesses surround the squad car. The rest of Robinson's crew from Genesis is already at the scene, watching police throw a man who has just been in a fight kicking and screaming into the back of the paddy wagon.
As the man kicks at the inside of the wagon's door, Robinson asks the other security guards what happened. They nonchalantly tell him a fight broke out, but the cops were there to put the men away for the night.
It's a story that's becoming more common downtown, especially since the city agreed to allow downtown bars to stay open until 4 a.m. Not all bars have taken advantage of the later closing times, but the ones that have, particularly in the Granville mall area and Gastown, fill the streets with mayhem until the wee hours of the morning. Gunplay, fights, and drunken antics outside downtown clubs are part of the new gritty reality the city and bar owners are scrambling to get under control.
Bringing in Genesis's security guards is just one of the many solutions bar owners have attempted. ID machines where bar patrons will have to swipe their drivers' licences are expected to be up and running by the summer. In the meantime, Barwatch, the association representing 22 downtown clubs, had promised to move up closing times to 3 a.m. until the machines are in place and police levels can be increased to adequately deal with the problems. But that fell apart two weeks ago, when a few Barwatch bars stayed open until 4, saying they'd never agreed to close early in the first place. (Police also indicated they wouldn't be cutting overtime hours as a result of the shorter hours.) Last weekend, others followed suit.
A lasting solution to the problem, it seems, remains elusive.
Vic Ardanaz has been working the door at the Roxy nightclub for almost a decade now. He says troublemakers have always been around, but with the extended hours, problems are going on longer and later.
"Between 2:30 and 4 a.m., the people that are coming up to the door are wasted and we have to turn them away - that's when you start to get the problems on the street," Ardanaz says. "A big issue for the Vancouver police is over-service [of alcohol] and granted that's a problem. People just get annihilated."
Ardanaz is disappointed the city didn't listen to police objections to extending closing time from 2 a.m. to 4. The department argued that its numbers have been depleted since a mass retirement in November, making it harder to find the extra officers to patrol the extra late-night hours. "I don't really think it's so much an overtime issue for the police as it is they don't want to work the overtime because there is gunplay and violence and who wants to jeopardize themselves for that?" Ardanaz says.
Vance Campbell, vice-president of Barwatch - whose members also include the liquor board, police and the fire and health departments - admits there have been cases of over-service, but insists a bigger problem is "loaded" patrons gravitating to the Granville strip from other jurisdictions after the bars close. "We don't let them into the club and they get angry."
Whether or not the late-night influx from the suburbs is responsible, residents within yelling distance of the entertainment district are increasingly exasperated by growing chaos on the streets from midnight to four or five in the morning.
Brian Kerr has lived downtown for the past two years. From his west-facing loft apartment on Seymour Street, he overlooks most of the city, from Kitsilano to North Vancouver on a clear day. Unfortunately, his spectacular view also includes an empty lot beside the Roxy that acts as a gateway to the uproar on Granville Street.
Prior to last summer, Kerr had no problems with noise from the street below, because it usually died down before he headed to bed around the time the bars were closing at 2 a.m. Since the 4 a.m. bar- hour extension, however, even Kerr, who's a bit of a night owl, is getting frustrated.
"It's become a much rougher place. I walk down the street with my girlfriend at night and I'll get elbowed from people looking to get into a brouhaha. I think things have gotten a little out of control because there hasn't been any control as of yet. That in itself has propagated this, so now we have to do something drastic to bring it back under control."
Barwatch thinks the answer lies in additional police on the street. The group has already paid more than $735,000 to the city this year to cover the costs of bringing in another squad to patrol the entertainment district.
But according to VPD spokeswoman Sarah Bloor, the extra dollars only bring the total up to 16 officers and two sergeants to keep all the revelers in line around the downtown area. The extra police Barwatch pays for are part of a liquor enforcement unit specifically focused on the clubs open for the extended hours, Bloor says.
At the Roxy, staff has noticed the extra policing, but only in the club - not on the street. "The police came by the other night and complained there were more people on the street than there were in the club, but they won't let us let anyone else in," Ardanaz says. "So then you have more people on the street causing problems."
That's where Robinson and Genesis come in. Hired by Barwatch, they ensure there are more bodies on the street patrolling the four busiest blocks along Granville Street from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. on weekends.
It's easy to see what all the fuss is about. Robinson estimates between 1,000 and 2,000 people are out carousing on Granville between Helmcken and Robson on Friday and Saturday nights. The scene is like a mini Bourbon Street in New Orleans during Marti Gras. Drug dealers are tucked in doorways peddling their junk, people are being dragged from bars by friends in an alcoholic haze, women are throwing up in the alleyways and men are using any wall that presents itself as a urinal.
Every section of the strip reveals an entirely new set of problems. In the time it takes to walk down Granville Street once, the scene changes from a few people waiting in line to get into a club to 50 people lined up, stumbling into one another and getting into fights when the bars that close earlier let out.
Genesis maintains constant contact with the police and doormen to make sure everyone is aware of the troublemakers. On the company's first night on the job, it provided crowd control when someone shot himself in the foot at the Caprice nightclub. Genesis staff helped evacuate the street in front of the club so patrons could get out and police could conduct their investigation. In the commotion, Robinson had to restrain a man who took a swing at a cop.
There are limitations to what these private security guards can and are willing to do, however. Robinson, a former football player who once tried out for the B.C. Lions, says he isn't too keen on taking a gun off someone. Ultimately, Genesis is just extra eyes and ears on the street - its employees are not equipped with any special powers and are essentially just well-trained citizens with similar rights.
Robinson has good reason to worry about guns, which have been a big part of the late-night mayhem outside clubs in the past few months. Since last summer, there have been at least five incidents where patrons were injured or killed in shootings at downtown clubs. On March 20, there was a shootout outside Atlantis when two groups were thrown out of the club for fighting. The fight continued on the street and quickly escalated to gunfire. Earlier in the month, there was another shootout down the street from Atlantis and shots were fired outside Au Bar the week before that. On the same night that the man shot himself in the foot at Caprice, another man brandished a gun in a fight outside Voda nightclub before running away.
The rising number of gun-related cases has not gone unnoticed by city council. "What worries me is the perception that because of the 4 a.m. opening we are having more gunplay and people being killed," Coun. Jim Green says. "Maybe the 4 a.m. was a bad idea, I really don't know yet. This whole gun thing seems to have exploded recently in Canada - in Vancouver for certain. It's touching us very closely to home. It's very anti-Canadian and I really don't like it."
Genesis' president Camil Dubuc, who has 20 years of experience in the security business, says bar owners can take their own steps to reduce problems. "Control is the biggest problem. With line-ups and people in the streets walking everywhere, there is a problem," says Dubuc, who recommends bars immediately start using metal-detecting wands, similar to ones used at airports, to help with internal security and to deter people from bringing guns to downtown clubs.
Ardanaz calls wands a deterrent more than anything else. "A wand's not going to stop a bullet that's for sure." He admits he doesn't use wands at the Roxy because, he says, it's the bars that play gansta rap and hip hop that draw the gun-toting clientele, and the Roxy has long been known as a rocker bar.
Wands are a measure Barwatch has been hesitant to adopt, but Campbell says the group is more open to the idea after the recent rash of shootings downtown. The Caprice and the Plaza both recently brought in wands to their clubs. There are limitations to the wand system, however, because like Robinson, most bouncers aren't prepared to take a gun off someone if it is detected, Campbell says.
Genesis has offered another way to tackle the problem of violence around clubs. Four years ago, the Justice Institute and Solicitor General's office hired the company to assess what would be required to implement a training program for doormen in Vancouver. The idea was to make a certain amount of combat and conflict resolution training a prerequisite to working the door in Vancouver. Essentially, they wanted to
implement a certification process for doormen similar to the one that already exists for security guards in the city. But Dubuc says he hasn't heard from the Solicitor General's office since the study was completed. "As it stands now, anybody off the street can be a doorman."
Lack of training for doormen has been a problem in the past. In August 2002, a doorman at Stone Temple knocked out a 19-year-old in one punch, sending him to the pavement and putting him in hospital. Another infamous incident occurred at the now defunct 86 Street nightclub, when in 1992, the owners were successfully sued for $650,000 after their doormen choked a man unconscious and threw him face-first onto the sidewalk outside a Ramones show. The man suffered minor brain damage as a result.
In 2001, London, England, passed legislation to ensure mandatory certification and training of doormen before they're hired, according to Andrew Whittington, assistant chief trading standards officer with the Corporation of London. Whittington, who was instrumental in the city of London's decision to adopt the policy, explains it's now illegal for bars to use doormen who are not registered and wearing a badge.
London adopted the policy after incidents of bar violence and corruption among doormen - ranging from drug dealing to taking bribes - escalated out of control, said Whittington, adding the city is now studying the success of the program.
Included in London's certification process, Whittington says, is a criminal record check intended to minimize hiring of drug dealers and people with violent tendencies.
The B.C. Ministry of Safety and Solicitor General says it's clearing up red tape before passing similar legislation in B.C., and has no timeline for when the legislation would be implemented.
It's not a perfect solution for the city's gunplay problem, however, says Green. "If I'm a bouncer and I wand someone who has a gun on him, I don't care how certified I am - I don't want to take that gun off him," says Green, who believes more police walking the beat is a better alternative. "Police in my opinion, should be on the beat primarily and in cars if they need to go somewhere. I don't know anyone who feels safer with a cop in a car than they do with a cop on the street."
The Vancouver Police Union agrees. "There is no replacement for the police," says Tom Stamatakis, president of the VPU. "It would be very difficult to ask a private security officer or someone working in a bar to take the responsibility of the police. First off, they don't have the legislative authority to do many of the things [the police] do. I don't think it's fair to ask a person to place themselves in a dangerous situation with little or no training for often not a lot of compensation to do what the police do."
Doormen in the city typically work for $12 an hour.
A few years ago, Vancouver, like other jurisdictions in the province, moved away from using beat cops because it was labour- intensive and being on foot limits the area that can be effectively patrolled, says Stamatakis, who admits the city could use another 200 police officers. "In reality, [the beat cop] is a very effective way to deal with certain types of crimes - like open drug use, disorder and fighting."
Campbell of Barwatch would also like to see beat cops. "We need some help," he says. "[The police] for a long time have said that they are understaffed and need more resources and we agree with them. The best deterrent for these kinds of problems are police walking the beat."
In the meantime, Barwatch hopes the new ID system where patrons swipe their driver's licences, already running at the Plaza and soon to be operational at the Caprice, will help identify people causing problems downtown, providing a visual record of who was in the club that can be shared with police. It's something that would have helped in identifying the suspects at Atlantis two weeks ago, since police know they were inside the club prior to the shooting.
Campbell says bar owners have also been instrumental in lobbying for legislation that would make the cops' job easier - like an anti- fight by-law. That would allow police to issue a ticket to anyone caught throwing a punch, instead of having to charge them and take them in, which takes officers off the street.
To tackle the problem of suburbanites driving into town and creating problems, the city is even looking at extending the hours of operation of parking meters, funneling the extra revenue into policing.
As the second summer of late bar hours approaches, council and the bars alike know it's important to get the downtown mayhem under control. If not, the whole 4 a.m. bar hours experiment could turn out to be a costly mistake.
"The police are short-resourced," Campbell says. "They believe that we as club owners have contributed to the problems on Granville Street. We need to dispel that myth. That's what we're doing."