I realize that the riot is two weeks old now and that, for lack of other news, it’s been analyzed to pieces but a small personal perspective on why young people participate.
I was in a small riot in Paris many years ago, when I was a student there. It was on New Year’s Eve, in the Latin Quarter where all the students were. At first, we were in what seemed like a fun, spontaneous street celebration with loads of slightly tipsy young people roaming the streets. One girl went up to a proper French policeman directing traffic and kissed him on the cheek in the middle of the mild chaos.
But it escalated into something more somewhere after midnight. At some point, we suddenly found ourselves running through the streets with the rest of the crowd, as riot police chased us and fired off some rounds of tear gas. We saw kids being bundled up and hauled off in police vans. There might even have been a few fires. And why we did we hang around, running up and down the streets, refusing to leave?
It was fun. All the rules seemed to be suspended and it was somehow thrilling to be playing hide and seek with the cops, sprinting through the streets as they tried helplessly to catch up with us, then gathering somewhere else, only to do it again. We had no sense of what was happening in various parts of the neighbourhood– maybe serious vandalism. But for us, it was just a game where the anonymous cops, people you normally had to be wary of, were suddenly just silly cats to our silly mice.
Would I have felt differently if people had started breaking windows and stealing things? I’d like to imagine that perhaps a more sober inner adult would have emerged, but I’m not so sure. I was 24 and still at the super-clueless stage of my life, doing any number of stupid things that thankfully weren’t then recorded on Facebook or YouTube.
Nor even in the Paris newspapers. I looked the next day for some account of this major brawl between crowds of young people and the riot police, which in Vancouver, even then (1978) would have surely received screaming, World War Two headlines. But there was nothing, not even a brief item. For them, it was just part of what happens in a big city, not even worth noting.
23 responses so far ↓
1 Julia // Jul 2, 2011 at 10:00 am
while I am deeply disappointed in the events of June 15, I am starting to find it a little amusing that Vancouver thinks that riots are exclusive to Vancouver. You are right – it happens everywhere.
What is starting to trouble me is the notion that we have totally blown our international reputation. I would submit that our persistent, daily problem of the DTES, open drug use, and panhandling is far more damaging to our reputation than any drunken rampage will ever have.
2 Glissando Remmy // Jul 2, 2011 at 12:36 pm
The Thought of The Day
‘You know when people are on Vacation. They are relaxed and happy and all their rational thinking is OUT… mostly villainous thoughts are IN.’
Hey, Forrest Gump said it best : “Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
Same here.
Wait a minute! Wait a minute, who are you and what have you done with Frances Bula the Civic Life Reporter?
First you told us that you rode the Transit in Rome, the inexpensive way, the affordable way the most sustainable and on the budget way…the Gregor Robertson way.
And now you are reading to us, from out the yet unreleased Penny and Gregor Riotson Report?
It sounds like out of the City Hall ‘Non Mea Colpa’ official position.
‘It was fun. All the rules seemed to be suspended and it was somehow thrilling to be playing hide and seek with the cops, sprinting through the streets as they tried helplessly to catch up with us, then gathering somewhere else, only to do it again. ‘
It was fun? It was fun? Common…
‘The Cacnio Defense Team is calling for our next witness, Your Honor…Frances Bula, our Civic Life Expert. You’ll see, Your Honor, why we think all the charges against our client should be dropped immediately, she should be completely exonerated and apologized too. We’ll prove Your Honor, beyond reasonable doubt, that it was just fun. ‘It Was Fun!”’
The Journalism Flag must be flying at half mast or something. And it should be kept that way, most definitely until that Riotson Report is out or until the MSM comes out of their Vacation Mode.
IMHO.
We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.
3 Mike Hager // Jul 2, 2011 at 12:54 pm
Frances, I can’t picture you doing anything mildly destructive!
This reminded me of when I was in Chile, every year students and police there have a riot under the pretense of “lower tuition” or something like that.
Water cannons, tear gas, it all seems like a big game for both sides. The students get to release some tension and the police get to perfect their crowd control tactics. In the end, few people are hurt and everything returns to normal.
What I had a problem with, being in the middle of a lot of the riot, was the cowardliness of the violent rioters and the average bystanders clear lack of will to step in and stop these idiots.
I think our society has become so complacent that most people had no urge to put themselves in danger.
Taking pictures of rioters and posting them for police is all well and good, but I believe a couple rugby teams could have rolled through and ended that riot pretty quickly…
4 Dan Cooper // Jul 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
“in Vancouver, even then (1978) would have surely received screaming, World War Two headlines”
If the day comes when a riot in Vancouver is just being shrugged off as part of living in a “big city,” then it will be unfortunate. Would the same riot have been reported in New York City? In Tokyo? It’s worth remembering that Paris had a front row seat for the real WWII, not to mention the much larger riots of 1968, and many other things such as the police rounding up and murdering hundreds of activists (e.g. beating them unconscious and throwing them in the river, taking them back to the courtyard of the police station and beating them to death…) over a couple days in 1961. So, what in any normal place and time should been a notable event may have gotten lost in the general period of insanity and willful blindness.
5 Mira // Jul 2, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Wow, that’s just great Frances.
So, we shouldn’t worry then. Why spend all this money on a independent inquiry only to find out it was fun? To bring this kind of angle into the Riots is simply juvenile. People of Vancouver will not look away from this, that’s a guarantee, until all guilty parties (official and non) will pay the piper. Not even those pathetic boarded up windows at the Bay could help”Oh, we are so sorry and we are so good and the City manager and the Mayor and the Chief they all did everything right, but a bunch of Anarchists circumventing the Globe happened to be here…”
Glissando Remmy #2,
Maybe you should start your own blog dear, as a matter of fact I wonder why you didn’t do it…, where reasonable people could go and read the voice of reason.
I’ll even pay for the privilege.
6 George // Jul 2, 2011 at 5:15 pm
Glissando….. what Mira said!
7 Gerry McGuire // Jul 2, 2011 at 6:55 pm
Frances, I love you, but as a Vietnam era person who witnessed the sacrifices of and persecution suffered by those who opposed that war, including the police riots of Chicago in 1968 and the police riot in Gastown in 1971, I cannot relate strongly to rioting for “fun”. This from the Vancouver Charter:
“Mayor’s duties
208. The Mayor shall
To enforce law for government of city
(a) be vigilant and active at all times in causing the law for the government of the city to be duly enforced and obeyed;”
The honourable thing for Gregor Robertson to do would be to resign.
8 Max // Jul 2, 2011 at 6:56 pm
‘It was fun’.
I’ll ponder that while I think of the people that got beat, the property damage, the losses to 50 businessess, the poor woman who owned the Waves coffee shop that will not be re-opened for months because it was completely destroyed, as was her vehicle. Oh, and let’s not forget, she is in trauma counselling – and the loss of jobs to her staff.
And like you Frances, the ‘because it was fun’ reason was given by many dimwitted teens and 20 somethings and even more sadly, some of these idiots’ parents.
I am actually shocked you would admit to that type of stupidity.
24 isn’t exactly ‘young’. But I guess immaturity has no age bounderies.
9 sv // Jul 2, 2011 at 7:04 pm
I’ll buck the tide her Frances and decline to scold you. I guess there’s no room for self reflection when you’re dealing with the self righteous.
10 Lewis N. Villegas // Jul 2, 2011 at 7:48 pm
Seventy eight minus twenty-four…
I don’t subscribe to the theory that we had a “riot” a couple of weeks ago. Back in 1984 I did a walk-about the site the morning after the riot taking stock of an urban site under in the aftermath of stress conditions. Learned a lot. Morning after this one I did the same. But with a toddler on board, I drove rather than walk.
The amount of urban land covered was the same each times. There were some new twists like the burning cars; a greater amount of broken windows; and the looting at the Bay as seen on U-Tube looked to be more than at Eatons all those years ago. Maybe the VPD riot units broke down into smaller squads to push back the crowds this time.
However, the same element of police strategy was absent both times: no visible effort to shape the crowd behaviour in advance of hostilities; no effort to lead them into a path that was 100% police controlled; and no design to scatter the foot-traffic into transit, bars, and restaurants. We saw all those strategies deployed in NYC 17 years ago.
Of course, it takes boots on the ground to implement all that, plus pumping full capacity service into the LRTs and subways. We may wake up one morning in the not too distant future to find out that VANOC had both in 2010, but VPD didn’t just one year later.
The source of the problem was the same both times—Hooliganism. As long as we make drinking at sports venues part of the product on the field, court or on ice, we can expect the well-documented phenomenon of hooliganism to break out on a more or less predictable basis.
Vancouverites must decide. Is it necessary for the lucrative sports market to have the added revenues of selling alcohol at the games? Should the Stanley Cup Finals be dry? How big is the tax grab? Or, are revenues healthy enough already to warrant pulling the licenses?
11 The Fourth Horseman // Jul 2, 2011 at 10:58 pm
I agree, Lewis.
Although I think that booze is just one part of the equation. The kind of public drunkeness displayed as early as noon on Game 7 day—and not dealt with then and there—was not tolerated during the Olympics. You had about 140 pour-outs by VPD during all of this past Canada Day–a thoroughly family oriented and well planned day–, a drop in the proverbial bucket, compared to the Stanley Cup riot.
It’s one thing to be young, drunk and looking to flaut and taunt the establishment. But you couldn’t pay me enough to be a cop today, with the snotty, mouthy, self-entitled brats I see down on Granville Mall on many weekend nights.
However, its another step or two down the evolutionary scale go to the trouble of total rampage, to destroy things, for the thrill of it. To throw rocks and bottles and other projectiles at the cops, set things on fire and damage and steal from businesses while the dancing monkeys around you cheer you on.
Fun? No, just lunacy, nihilism and savagery, I think, where the sheer volume of the crowd allows you to stoop to the most base crowd behaviour and operate, not as an individual, but as part of a single pulsating organism. Where you have forfeited your critical thinking and surrendered to that Lord of the Flies mentality. It’s not about “fun”—It’s actually about power and cruelty, IMO.
Remember that journalist, savaged in Tahrir Square in Egypt? I don’t think we were that far removed from that frenzied scenario after Game 7 —given that some citizen defenders were set upon by the crowd (including a petite woman, trying to protect a car, who had a f**king table thrown directly AT her by some brave male orangutan). Not a lot of fun there. Thank god no one died. The whole damned thing was a powder keg whose drunken fuse was lit well before the end of Game 7. “Spontaneous”, my ass.
I give full marks to social media for holding up a mirror—or is that a smartphone?—and chronicling the stupidity. A supreme irony that this self obsessed Gen, busy becoming part of the action in order to show they were there, have been hoisted on their own petards of narcissicsm.
12 Dan Cooper // Jul 3, 2011 at 12:05 am
I do think Frances raises a good point. Right or wrong (and I think we would pretty much all agree it is wrong), many or most of the people taking part in a riot such as the recent one here – and perhaps the one Frances got wrapped up in in Paris years ago, though perhaps there was something more serious going on that she as an outsider was simply unaware of – were in it for the fun: letting it all go, dancing, drinking, smashing things, or having sex in the streets, or for that matter standing back and enjoying the show. Not politics. Not because of winning or losing a sports game, although I suspect the over-the-top End Of The World buildup to game seven didn’t help. Not because of “nihilism,” much less “anarchism,” or any other -ism in any concrete philosophical sense. Just “fun,” in somewhat the same way some people enjoy getting drunk and screaming obscenities at sports events, attacking people different from themselves, or defacing statues. (Or, dare I say, the kind of people whose definition of Vancouver as a “no fun city” – not everyone who uses that term, to put in a disclaimer, but a meaningful part it seems to me – is that they can’t get blind drunk at a tavern on any street corner while listening to music loud enough to wake people three blocks away, then puke in my bushes while screaming obscenities outside my window at 3 am.) All strange ideas in my view, but there they are. The question then becomes, how do you address and stop people who are either bent on seeking “fun” in that way or willing to get swept up in it from being able to do so. Liquor control, appropriate limits on crowding in venues, appropriate police presence to head off trouble rather than try to stop it once it starts, other physical arrangements such as others have mentioned…
This does not apply to all riots, of course. There are riots that are for political purposes, for example opposing or supporting a war, an oppressive government, or other things. But, my strong impression is that Frances is right, a twisted sense of “fun” was the main thing driving the recent riot here.
Personally, as I drove down Broadway about 4:30 pm on that day, I felt already and even there that the atmosphere was poisonous – too loud and too tense. Went home and figuratively pulled the covers over my head.
13 Dan Cooper // Jul 3, 2011 at 12:08 am
Hmm… Tense isn’t the right word in that last sentence, although perhaps it was a factor in the feeling. I think “wild” would be more accurate.
14 The Fourth Horseman // Jul 3, 2011 at 1:00 am
@Dan,
I used “niialism” , not on the political sense but in this social sense:
‘A delusion, experienced in some mental disorders, that the world or one’s mind, body, or self does not exist’
I think, given in the context of the crowd behaviour, and the sense that some seemed to believe that there was a suspension of “order” and normal existence and rules, the word is quite apt.
15 Frances Bula // Jul 3, 2011 at 6:40 am
To all my defenders, thanks, but I was expecting to be scolded for this post. I didn’t actually destroy anything, btw, but I did contribute to the mayhem, along with thousands of others, by becoming one of the people the police had to chase around as they were trying to figure out who was really destructive and who wasn’t.
The point I was trying to make was that young people, especially, get caught up in these things because they feel like fun at the time, the consequences don’t seem real, you just don’t think about the damage (just as you don’t think about it in many other scenarios in your 20s), and you get drunk on the spirit of lawlessness and breakdown of the norms.
(Not unlike what happens on this blog and others, occasionally, as there’s a pile-on as people feel the usual norms of civility don’t apply.))
But it was silly and could have been really atrocious and I was stupid — but that’s what riots are about. I was just trying to shed a little light.
16 Roger Kemble // Jul 3, 2011 at 7:12 am
@ Frances
“I looked the next day for some account of this major brawl between crowds of young people and the riot police, which in Vancouver, even then (1978) would have surely received screaming, World War Two headlines.
Well your 1978 do wasn’t like . . . http://wn.com/1968_student_riots
. . . (evidently La France takes these thing in her stride) nor Gastown, 1971. I was at the latter before all hell broke loose: until then it seemed friendly.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit was quite the rage in ’68: I wonder what happened to him!
Europe is used to unrest: Northern England soccer hooligans rampaged for as long as I can remember until they were banned from the continent.
What with the Arab spring, debt riots, tag-along Canada’s wars and Israel marauding innocent shipping on the high seas lawlessness is be coming quite de rigueur.
Vancouver’s eruption over a trivial team loss is bothersome especially the snitches (Who is more contemptible the rioters or the snitches?) handing over tattle tale pics to the cops.
In comparison to gravitas going on elsewhere, if that describes Vancouver’s youth of today then . . . I am not impressed!
17 The Fourth Horseman // Jul 3, 2011 at 2:28 pm
@ Roger,
“tattle tales?”
So, if someone attacked one of yours, or set your car on fire, and someone had the perp in a pic, you WOULDN’T want that info passed to the cops?
Wow. Just wow. You are so forgiving. Especially over a hockey game.
18 Roger Kemble // Jul 3, 2011 at 5:03 pm
TFH @ #17
Here’s my take on the “tattle talers”.
But first let me distance myself from those scrambling to cast blame. City hall and the cops showed remarkable good faith, respect and maturity for local hockey fans especially after the tempered Olympic street crowds: pity they were let down.
So the crowd got out of hand. Why didn’t our indignant tattle talers leave when they saw the temper escalate to violence? Because, IMO, they were enjoying themselves: or as Frances admits of her 1978 experience, It was fun.
If the photographers were so close to the action why didn’t they just go home?
Why didn’t they try to stop the perps?
Hundreds of photos have been submitted, I understand. This presents too convenient an opportunity to settle personal scores or to be just plain vindictive.
Can anything but close up full frontal ID be conclusive in such a melee?
There are too many questions to satisfy me. Meddlesome amateurs should just keep out of it.
I understand hundreds of charges are expected. How many standup in court is anther matter.
19 Joseph Jones // Jul 3, 2011 at 5:18 pm
just part of what happens in a big city
Globalistic reductionism! France is far from Canada.
Without Quebec, Canada would be insufferable. Quebec is too far from British Columbia.
20 The Fourth Horseman // Jul 3, 2011 at 10:19 pm
@Roger #18
Thanks for the fuller explanation, Roger. I agree on your points, but think there must have been a few who were more of the “citizen journalist” types rather than just posturing, gawking thrill seekers.
At least I hope so. Sigh.
21 michelle // Jul 4, 2011 at 8:43 pm
glissando remmy…what george #06 said!
22 Adam Fitch // Jul 11, 2011 at 7:51 pm
Frances, I take your main point in your original post and your further comments at comment #15, and I agree. Kids are carefree and do not think about consequences, and that is the simple explanation of why the riot happened.
It is not excusable, and it should not have happened, and it does give vancouver a bit of a black eye, but it cannot be compared to the G20 riot in toronto last summer, or paris in 1968.
A riot such as Vancouver’s last month is a very different animal from political riots, and has simply to do with drunkenness, frustration (at the canucks losing, and tickets to the game being so expensive, and vancouver being so expensive).
I think that basically, the police did a good job in the situation – they were far outnumbered. I do not think that gregor robertson was to blame for inviting people downtown. Judging from the behaviour at the olympics, there was nothing to worry about.
But I do think that, considerering that the public was invited downtown, there should have been more of a plan, and more expese paid to crowd control. The police presence in vancouver was a small fraction of what it was in Toronto for the G20, or compared to the huge security presence for the olympics. some more security might have made a big difference.
As to the mood on June 15, I have heard and read several people who said that the mood was toxic or wild or tense. I was there and I did not sense that at all. I thought it was fun and tame myself.
One more thing: I do not understand all the people screaming for retribution. Do we not believe in the justice system in BC?
23 West End Gal // Jul 13, 2011 at 6:09 pm
Adam Fitch #22
So do these people @ Vision or from Hollyhock or City Hall or whoever pays you to write this idiocy, do they pay you well?
To downplay what happened on June 15 is moronic on so many levels.
Whatever.
Nice reverse psychology bull, amigo!
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