Fear Factor: Vancouver Crime and the Private Security Industry
The Vancouver Police Department is stretched to the limit, leaving a handful of Vancouver crime fighting in the hands of the private security industry
It’s 2:45 p.m. and we’re sitting in the heart of Vancouver’s shame. At a bench on the corner of Victory Square, a pair of drug dealers slouch, chatting on their cell phones. A gangly guy with a bushy salt-and-pepper beard cuts through the park carrying a large shiny bag full of booty, presumably headed for one of the seedy pawnshops in East Van. No doubt about it, he’s a booster (street lingo for a shoplifter).
A conspicuously clean-cut white guy with thick, gelled hair is heading toward Pender Street when he abruptly alters course after spotting Dylan Goertzen and his partner Paulo Mota, the duo I’m shadowing this evening.
“That’s Michael. He’s addicted to crack and he’s a chronic shoplifter,” says Goertzen, reducing the details of the man’s life to a pathetic one-sentence bio.
Michael disappears into an alley, shoulder-checking nervously.
On the corner of Hastings and Cambie streets, another emaciated male exhibits the jerky spasmodic contractions of someone in the throws of cocaine psychosis. He sips on an extra large 7-11 cup and dips constantly in and out of the alley between Cambie and Abbott streets to cut crack deals behind a dumpster. Two of his customers, sad, greying 50-somethings, emerge from the alley. They park it on a retaining wall in the middle of the square and spark up a crack pipe. Less than 10 metres away, a well-dressed woman sits on a bench and obliviously taps away on a laptop – or perhaps she is simply resigned to this carnival of corruption in downtown Vancouver. In 15 minutes, Goertzen, 30, and 28-year-old Mota have identified at least a half-dozen people by first and last names, mostly drug- and alcohol-addicted thieves on the perpetual treadmill of chronic repeat offending.
3:05 p.m.: Along comes Clint.
“This guy’s sneaky. He waits at the back entrance of stores for an employee to open the door to dump some garbage, and then he slips inside when they’re not looking,” Goertzen says. Clint is no Pink Panther. Dishevelled, unshaven and cagey, he’s about as subtle as a bagpiper at a yoga retreat. Still, he gets away with it, time and time again. Clint unabashedly, or unknowingly, walks directly up to Goertzen.
“Wanna buy some wine?” he inquires, opening a duffel bag containing at least $200 worth of red.Goertzen peers inside.
“No thanks, man. My girlfriend only drinks white,” he says.
No chance for commerce here. Clint zips the bag and strikes toward the alley where the spasmodic crack dealer is uncontrollably waving his arms around and selling more crack behind the dumpster.
3:10 p.m.: Goertzen and Mota switch into active surveillance mode, then make a call to the District 2 dispatcher at the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) to report a suspect in possession of a bag of stolen property. Mota is put on indefinite hold by the dispatcher as Clint heads east and out of their beat. Goertzen and Mota observe him for a few minutes then, shrugging their shoulders, decide to drop it. Clint vanishes with his wine.
It would take a veritable army of people to tag, monitor and trail the dealings of these seedy characters and the numerous petty and more serious offenses that occur on an average day in downtown Vancouver. Goertzen and Mota, with their earpieces, intimate knowledge of Vancouver’s gritty street life and CSI-type jargon, seem like your typical undercover cops. Except they’re not. They’re loss-prevention officers working for Genesis Security Group under contract to the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA), and their beat is a bustling 90-square-block area that’s home to some 8,000 businesses. They’re part of a growing private-security army that has become a fixture of modern society, a parallel security force that we tend to take for granted but don’t necessarily understand.
The private security industry is booming in B.C. Its foot soldiers are everywhere, and for the most part it’s far from glamorous work – riding mountain bikes around Granville Island, keeping a lonely midnight vigil over desolate industrial parks, working the nightclub doors and going nose-to-nose with intoxicated patrons, monitoring closed-circuit TV from windowless rooms, sniffing out insurance fraud and unearthing evidence for civil litigation. They could be the guys and gals in the bright banana-yellow jackets or dressed, like Goertzen and Mota, as skater kids, carrying out covert surveillance in the downtown core while you and I go about our daily business.
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