Glacier Media joined police on patrol during the March 22 night shift. The call load included a stabbing, arresting a man with a loaded “zip gun” and stopping a man from jumping off the Lions Gate Bridge.
A man is threatening to jump off the Lions Gate Bridge.
A man near the train station at Main Street and National Avenue has been robbed at knifepoint of his electric scooter.
Police are on alert for protesters outside a west side restaurant where a diplomat from India is dining.
These are some of the calls Vancouver police officers were dealing with Wednesday night as Insp. Marco Veronesi rolled through the city in his Ford Explorer, his laptop lit up with maps, statistics and details on each file.
The calls came in when Veronesi — the department’s duty officer for the night — was a few hours into his 12-hour shift, which began at 4:30 p.m.
By shift change in the morning, the call load will have topped 251.
Some will be serious (a woman in her 60s stabbed in the back several times in the Downtown Eastside), some not (providing a blanket for a young homeless man on Granville Street).
None of the calls will make the six o’clock news.
“A lot of us joined policing to go to those emergency calls, where the adrenalin gets going and you’re flying across the city to go do this or go do that — save a life, that kind of thing — but that’s probably 10 to 20 per cent of the job,” said Veronesi, whose laptop screen was dominated at the time by calls for suicidal and missing persons.
Others in the queue included a parent worried about her son being bullied at school, a possible break-and-enter, a suspicious person report, a car accident, an alarm call to a restaurant, a check on the well-being of a person and a request for police to provide assistance to firefighters and paramedics.
The majority of calls was generated from the north side of the city.
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