So.
I'm currently homeless, as I've stated elsewhere in this bloggy scream into the void.
Some nasty shit just happened, and seeing how it seems I'm being "sandbagged" as my cousin puts it, I'm going to tell the story here. Because I don't know if I will get to tell my side of this story in court. It appears to me I'm getting railroaded into a nasty splotch.
I got beat up by a VPD officer yesterday, and he charged ME with assaulting HIM.
I never threw a single punch. My hands were on my backpack, trying to keep him from stealing from me and throwing it away, when he started whaling on me. I just spent almost 20 hours in the lockup, because I thought it was wrong for a police officer to take my stuff.
Wrong in the same kind of way that driving a First Nations person who's drunk out into the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter and leaving him there to walk home.
I have no criminal record, and I intend to keep it that way. But I was just vilified today by a prosecutor who lavishly and darkly embellished second and third hand information to try and make me seem like some kind of perverse social deviant.
Maybe in the end I'll be vindicated and it will all be fine. But I won't ever get compensated for 20 blows to the head and chest. For having to scream out loud at the top of my lungs the whole story 5 or six times so that all my old neighbors in my community would come out to witness my arrest, so that I couldn't just be beat up and hauled away quietly like they wanted to happen. For days of my time when I should be trying to find a home, find food to eat when I'm broke since my guitar was stolen, take care of my dog, arrange job interviews. I'll never be compensated for being targeted. Or watching my dog shake and run around scared wondering what's happening to me.
I'm just another ILLEGAL homeless person. So I don't have rights. After 11 pm anywhere I lay my tarp is actually illegal for me to sleep. Its all private property or the Queen's land.
And now, due to the actions of an aggressive, homeless person hating police officer and his partner, on the prompting by the one neighbor out of 10 that hates me, I have a "violent" tag on me. So every cop from this point on that runs across me is going to treat me with the same aggression and violent attitude. I'm fucked, no matter what. Even if I win in court, every encounter with police is going to go sour after this, because the officers involved with this particular incident are selectively taking notes to cover their ass.
It sucks, because there are a LOT of really reasonable good hearted community minded cops out there that I've met, and the 10% who are dicks makes them look bad as a whole.
So...
A week ago, I needed to print something. I didn't have money for the library printer, so I asked my cousin if I could print it when I saw her on the street catching a bus. She said she'd be back about 11 pm. so around 10 pm I went to her place and waited in this little lane beside her house.
Now this little lane has been in dispute in the neighborhood for years.
It's actually a gas line access lane and no structures can be built on it, no one owns it, but it isn't big enough to be a full alley and doesn't run right through. If you look at the city plan (which I have when we dug something out there years back) it's a city gas lane.
But the house beside my cousin's and the one next to him both try to lay claim to it, over and over. She was late, so I crashed in it.
3 feet by 4.5 was the footprint of my military style tarp when folded that way.
In the morning, the one next door neighbor, the most uptight yuppie in our formerly laid-back cultural community neighborhood, with his expensive Triumph motorcycle, and his new cars and locks and video surveillance all over his uptight property, sees me as he's off to work.
He gets that asshole gleam in his eye, runs back into the house, gets his uber-expensive digital SLR camera, runs out to the end of the lane and pints it at me, feeding my dog and getting prepared to roll up my tarp once the dew evaporates off in the morning sun.
Snap!! Snap!! He gets me, facing the dog with my middle finger gesticulating as if it were flexing his anus. "I'm calling the police!!!" he exclaims, "this is private property!!!"
I know for a fact that he knows this is not private property, because he was around when we all looked at the city plan that day, back when I lived in the house my cousin is in.
I've spent close to 11 years of my life living in that house. I'm not some random person in the lane, and I wasn't planning on making it my home. Just the back lane has skunks and racoons.
I told him go ahead, I'd be gone in a couple minutes if he'd cool down. Off he stomps.
Like I said, I'm waiting the 10 minutes it will take for the dew to burn off and my cousin isn't up yet, so I take the dog around the 2 blocks that I call my old neighborhood. She sniffs about for a pee, and I scrounge some cigarette butts to roll a smoke. That's what broke, homeless people that smoke do in the morning right?
So 10 minutes later we round the alley, she's half a liter lighter, and I have my splendiferous trove of butt-raunch, including the glorious blessing of a couple of Prime Time ends to sweeten the stew. I look to my tarp, ready to pack it up and roll a smoke.
There, at the end of the alley, is asshole yuppie bitch man, dragging my tarp and pack over to his Smithwright bin, throwing it inside, and then locking my stuff in his garbage can. Locking it in.
What a fucking asshole.
I'm homeless, but my tarp and pack doesn't touch garbage. I don't collect bottles for the same reason, it's unclean.
I'll describe the altercation in detail later, but suffice to say there was no way for cooler heads to prevail in this little child shitfest of nonsense.
The police officers that attended the scene, all 3 of them, were some of the most respectful, non-judgmental and just plain nice officers I've ever dealt with. Everyone said so, my cousin, her downstairs neighbor, the neighbor across the street, the ones on the other side of the house, everybody liked the way they acted and treated everyone. Like I said, it was a shitfest that got a lot of people involved that didn't really need to be bothered at 7:30 am, but the officers on the scene smoothed the fracas down very positively and I got my stuff back. They told him that he would have been charged with assault for starting the whole thing, but really I wasn't in the mood for gloating, I just wanted my stuff out of his sick little boy garbage can.
So, forward 2 days. I've been about doing stuff, starving. I stop by my cousins to drop off a couple of things out of my pack and pick up something to read, and check my email and messages for work. It's 9 pm, she's still at college, so I wander the little access lane and pick the blackberries to eat, then get some figs from the back yard tree. Having had some basic nutrition, I sit on my cousins front porch, with my pack against the house, and have a smoke while my dog hangs with our cat, who's been chilling at my cousin's. Cat's don't do so well on leashes, so he's just been hanging out with her for a couple months. I wait for her to get home so I can do my 20 minutes worth of internet and then I'll schluff off to find a spot to crash. I have no intentions on using the access lane, because I promised I wouldn't after last time, and its too visible of a spot anyway for an ILLEGAL homeless person to chill. I've been there about 30 minutes total at this time, with berries-figs-smokes taking my attention.
And suddenly there's a very cranky looking plainclothes policewoman standing at my cousins gate asking me my name. She's being VERY bitchy and disrespectful about her interrogation of this obviously evil person she's confronting, as he scratches his cat and dog and inhales his hunger suppressing nicotine death stick.
She's not being polite. She's out to arrest and fuck with one of those horrible illegal homeless people that obviously need to be eradicated from the landscape of the New Canadian Order.
She's grilling me imperiously, and I inform her that this is not South Africa during Apartheid. I do not need a pass to show I am allowed to live or walk or sit, and I do not have to fulfill her information requirements unless I am doing something for which I am to be fined or arrested for. If she had been polite I would have told her my name and birthday. But honestly, it is against the law for her to force even that information out of me unless I have committed a crime for which she is about to write me up. We supposedly do have basic human rights in Canada, one of which is to not be forced to submit to spot interrogations of our personal information based on our appearance or race.
She starts to use social pressure tactics, which probably work on most of the homeless people she harasses. People with mental disabilities or shitfaced on this or that. But I actually do know how to read and research, and in case you haven't noticed, civil rights and social justice issues are a very large part of my research. It isn't communist Russia or China, it's Canada.
The True North Strong and FREEEEEEEEEE.
Being interrogated for my personal information so she can go digging in her little computer to try and find some kind of dirt to fling at me is NOT freedom. Move along, move along, illegal human.
I'm welcome at anytime to sit on my cousin's porch and have a smoke. I'm even allowed to crash in the back yard, I just can't because the raccoons and skunks scare the hell out of koala, and there's a lot of them in the green jungle that is my non-conformist uncle's back yard. You can't mow there, there are rhubarbs and various other plants as tall as your head. Heaven for racoons at night. They have their raccoon combat arena back there. Ever listen to racoons fight? Almost makes ME shit myself, never mind my mellow little dog. But I digress.
Oh right. Pressure.
She say's she's going to charge me with trespassing on my uncle's/cousin's property.
"I am allowed to be here" I say quietly. Smoke curling through my stressed out fingers.
That's not good enough for her redneck male partner. He's obviously pissed that she doesn't have me shuffling of down the street with my loads, moving along, or coming quietly into the back of the cruiser for a ride with her righteousness.
He hops the fence, stomps up the stairs, bangs loudly on the two suite doors like he's making a bust at a known gang breeding facility, can't get an answer from the obviously out and about no-shows who live there, goes around back, stomps, bangs, comes back, acuses me of not having the right to sit on this porch and smoke, and then....
He grabs my pack.
I have nothing.
All my paintings, my musical recordings collected over the years, my few good books, my computer, I lost all those things when some fucking asshole gangsters tried to dummy me up in my house I was renting.
The only things I have are in that pack, and none of them are sentimental.
It is a survival pack, with a -35 degree rated sleeping bag, a military tarp, DOG FOOD, a small pouch of documents necessary to try and get SHELTER/WELFARE, a pouch with tie- downs/ropes/Velcros, a slingshot to scare off crows who like to filch sandwiches, and a saw to cut wood for files or shelters.
He grabs my SURVIVAL,
takes it off of my cousins property
and goes to put it in his police car.
He stole my pack. He purposefully instigated a confrontation.
He knows if he takes it and throws it away, there will be no record, I won't be able to sue, or go to the cop shop and complain. It goes to about 2 degrees these days. I need the sleeping bag, I need the dog food. He has directly threatened my base survival and ontological security and he knows that, hungry and tired as I am I am not going to be able to let him just steal it and drive away, because like a native in the freezing Winnipeg countryside, there will be no record or recourse for me. I'm homeless, I have no rights compared to him.
My dog is confused, where is the man taking her dog food? Aren't we going to hang out with the nice cousin and the cats for a bit?
So I run out, panicked at my survial being STOLEN illegally from the side of my uncle and cousin's house, grab my pack in his hands and he immediately screams out
"You're assaulting me!!! He's assaulting a police officer!!!!"
My hands are still on the pack alone, as he then begins to whale on my head, 3 full punches aimed at my temple, then 5 knee strikes aimed at my stomach.
My Sensei in my early 20's was Farid. I didn't have money to go far in his dojo, and I turned to soft-style as well (tai chi, yoga, bo, etc.) because I needed to tone down the agression that is necessary for the whole champion thing I never wanted much of. I was into the whole wax on wax off thing really, zen and all that, but at my orange belt after a year with Farid I had learned how to avoid getting hurt. Because he could pretty much break your leg or ribs with one shot. He and his wife are excellent teachers if you ever want to go into competition. I'm more interested in the whole Aikido concept of diffusing situations and not causing harm if possible these days.
My hands were still on the pack. I'm yelling "You can't steal my pack, I've done nothing illegal"
Except be an illegal human being of course.
The blows kept coming, the screaming foaming cop assaulting homeless man continued, I made absolutely no strikes. And the neighbors came out to see the ruckus. To watch the cop continue to beat me throughout the next half hours as I continually reiterated the sequence of events loudly so my old neighbors would get the whole story, not the bullshit "he was attacking a police officer story that the two officers were trying in vain to brainwash them with. It's a good thing I'm fairly solid or I'd have a lot of bruises.
These people let their kids play with my dog.
I watched their children grow, eating berries from the lane and playing in the street I'm now lying in.
All of this, the officer stealing my pack, the officer beating the crap out of me while my hands are on my pack, him continually punching me in the back of the neck and kneeing me in the side as I'm on the ground to try and stop me from telling the assembling neighbors about what he had done,
It's all on the yuppie ashole's security camera. You know, the two cameras he has watching his nice cars and bikes from being theived. He has a contract with a local high security company to secure his property. So the whole thing is on a camera.
In jail, 18 hours later, the duty council (lawyer poor people get) smirks at me. "If it's not going to help their case against you, I don't think they'll be getting a copy of that videotape for the trial from the neighbor".
Interesting eh?
That, or it'll probably "go missing" very conveniently, unless there's an offsite backup.
Oh, as I edit this later, what do I see?
The "24 hour video surveillance monitoring" sign is suddenly gone from where it was the last 3 years. Who wants to bet that some policeman had a talk withthe owner and suddenly all traces of this evidence will disappear. That's the way things work here in Canada.
Soon they'll just flat out take bribes.
Later, as I started to write this, my cousin tells me that the officer who beat me was calling the 5 neighbors the next day. Asking if they would like to lay charges. The old Japanese (I hope it's Japanese) gentleman whose family lives across the way says "yeah, I'd like to make a statement against YOU, and the guy across the street, for what you did to Chris"
I don't think the officer took those notes down. He probably discarded the phone numbers of my neighbors that he had collected, because he got the same reaction from all of them. Gone, just like the video tape. "What witnesses, what are you talking about?"
So.
I didn't throw a single punch or kick, my neck and head are sore from being pummeled, I'm stiff all over from being stored in a 16 dgree jail cell with no headrest and no blanket, in a T-shirt (which is how they treat people in the jail, everyone is freezing the whole time) and I have to try, with no money to phone around and get legal help because I'm charged with assaulting a PEACE officer.
Kind of ironic, that title.
PEACE officer.
Of course, non of this really matters does it? Because I'm an illegal human.
And finally, I have to relate another previous incident. Because the prosecutor trotted the third hand information out in court to make me look evil and dastardly.
A couple months ago, I was down on Hastings street, going to the Canadian tire to get a cart for my homeless wandering. So I'm standing next to the Waldorf hotel, which is only a tiny bit less scuzzy than it once was.
Two crackheads start jiving me. Puffing themselves up. 2 skinny little scumbags acting tough. No front teeth, splotchy red marks on their skin (aids maybe), dirty and scruffy, they try to pick a fight with me when I tell them to fuck off and leave me alone. Instead of fucking off, they try to get a fight going even more, harassing me. So I wave them off with my little 4" inch knife. Not that I need it, I could fight these two with one hand tied behind my back, but I'm sick of wasting time with their shit.
They take off, flag a cop, and tell him I was attacking them. I was minding my own fucking business until they started razzing me. 15 minutes later I have six cops surrounding me on hastings street, guns drawn, me on the ground. A female cop pulls out my little bag of LACTAID pills and TYLENOL and starts screaming at me -"you're a fucking drug dealer" over and over.
They throw me in an ambulance and drag me off to St. Paul's to have a chat with a psychologist, where for 2 hours I have cops trying to grill me illegally for my personal information, even though I've been told over and over that I'm not being charged with anything. They checked everything out, and apparently the two crackheads are off to jail, the psychologist is looking at the detective who dragged me there, asking him "Why did you bring him here? he's not crazy at all." Three hours later I walk out of the hospital, a day wasted, cold, hungry, all my stuff and money locked up at the cop shop, no bus pass.
And there, in court the other day, the prosecutor trots this story out, recolors it to say I was attacking the two crackheads, makes no mention of the outcome, relates with great trepidation and fear that I was assessed for craziness at St. Paul's, but neglects to mention the outcome of that assessment.
In case you haven't clued in, Mr. Railroading Prosecutor, police are often called by the actual ASSHOLES in an incident, so that the decent person gets harassed, until the cops actually figure out what's going on. I wasn't charged and this is being used as evidence against me in my "assaulting a police officer by grabbing my pack out of his hands so he couldn't steal it" charge.
I do have to say though, innocent or guilty, if you are in jail you eat WAY better than any homeless person in Vancouver. It's just 2 ham sandwiches, juice, fruit and cookies, but it comes 3 times a day every single day. Homeless people have to walk miles between the various places that only serve one meal a week. Miles from their home communites, just to eat.
