That Lonely Section of Hell

by Lori Shenher

  In the Strike Force, you are part of a team of eight to ten people in four to five cars, each with a driver and another officer known as a “foot,” who is there to follow and watch when the target is walking or stationary. The feet call all the target’s movements when the target isn’t in a vehicle. When the target gets into a vehicle or on public transit, the surveillance picks up speed and drivers often take huge risks at breakneck pace to catch up if circumstances or traffic put them out of the game for any length of time.

  On this dark November early evening, the surveillance became fast and intense, and our team struggled to keep sight of the target vehicle. My driver dropped me near Main Street and East 2nd Avenue to observe the direction of the target’s turn around the corner and broadcast it to the rest of the team, but when I’d done the job, rather than pick me up on Main, my driver roared past me in his excitement to follow the bad guys. We were all still learning the rhythm of surveillance, and everyone was so excited. No one noticed that “the feet are up” message indicating that everyone who was on foot had been picked up had not been sent out over the radio.

  My sense was our bad guys were close to doing their crime, so rather than trying to get on the crowded air to tell my team I was still out there, I decided to follow the surveillance on the radio and run to get myself back into it somehow. Portable radios have a far shorter range than vehicle radios, however, and I felt a growing dismay when the reception became ever fainter as the distance increased between me and the southbound surveillance. As I reached the peak of the south slope of the city, I regained radio reception and heard someone on my team say the targets looked interested in a warehouse on the Fraser River at the very south end of Vancouver, more than forty blocks from where I’d started running. I began looking around me for a bus or a cab, desperate to get there before the crime was committed, but seeing none, I kept on running, grateful for the steeper downhill grade after running uphill for so many blocks. As I ran, I heard someone come over the air and say, “Anyone got Shenher, yet?” followed by dead air. Just as I was about to respond that I was coming, someone else came on and said, “Heads up, targets are parking.” This was followed by a mad flurry of voices on air, people advising they were taking this position and that, so I just kept on running, hoping I’d be able to figure out exactly where they were when I got there.

  Piecing together odd bits of communications, I found the target vehicle and, to my surprise, located the two bad guys working on a side door of the warehouse. I buried myself in a bush and peered out. Our road boss came over the air, asking, “Anyone got an eye yet?” Dead silence. An “eye” was what we called the surveillance person on foot trying to get a visual on the target. This person on foot will have a front eye watching the front of a location, and another will hold a rear eye position, watching in case the target goes in or comes out the back. This ensures that the target won’t see obvious undercover cops sitting in cars directly outside. The cars remain in “sets” a couple of blocks from the target, ready to roll if the target comes out and drives off in a vehicle.

  “I got it,” I said calmly.

  “Shen?” exclaimed a surprised road boss. I was about to click my radio twice to indicate affirmative, but just then the bad guys forced their way through the warehouse door.

  “Heads up—targets just kicked in the warehouse door. We have crime,” I said.

  Everything went a little crazy. Discipline at takedown time is hard to orchestrate and maintain in surveillance, but the team managed to hold it together long enough for me to organize the takedown and then call the targets coming back out carrying stolen goods. I radioed, “Targets are out. Take down! Take down!” and watched as my team jumped on the bad guys and arrested them.

  I crawled out from my hiding spot and walked toward the team as they backslapped and high-fived each other. When they saw me approach across the parking lot, the conversation stopped.

  “Shen! Holy shit! Did you run here?” our road boss asked. I nodded, suddenly feeling the chill settling into my bones. I stood there in my heavy black Dayton boots, sweat soaked through my outer jacket and jeans, my hair wet and straggly.

  “You fucking guys owe me a beer,” I said.

  ON THE LAST night of our STAR course, we went to the old VPD bar called the PAC, or Police Athletic Club, apparently named for the athleticism required to carry a beer and play pool at the same time. Only VPD employees and their signed-in guests were allowed entry. Wherever the name came from, in the few years it remained open early in my career, I found it next to impossible to go there and not drink too much, and I was one of the more controlled drinkers. It wasn’t uncommon to see guys passed out under the tables, and many a marriage was ruined in the back stairwell. Had that club not closed down in the late ’90s, I might not have survived, and I know others who wouldn’t have. I’m pleased to report that the levels of impaired driving by off-duty police are nowhere near where they used to be and the new crop of police officers is far more responsible than we were.

  Police of my era were—and I’m deeply ashamed to say myself included—a fairly entitled bunch, and many of us held the unspoken belief that we were better drivers drunk than civilians were sober, an obviously ludicrous and dangerous belief. The hypocrisy of this thinking is not lost on me, and I have no rational explanation for it. We were supposed to hold ourselves to a higher standard, and I know I failed miserably. I’m repulsed by my behavior in those days, and we lost a couple of colleagues to impaired driving crashes but fortunately didn’t kill or hurt anyone else.

  At the bar, Mike Porteous, widely considered the best surveillance person and instructor the VPD has ever known, racked up the billiard balls, and I broke to begin a game of eight ball. Afterward, he motioned me to bring my beer and join him at an empty table.

  “Listen, I want to talk to you about something,” he said, looking at me with a somber expression. I’d never seen him drunk, and he wasn’t on this night. I was still in good shape after two or three pints.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I want you to promise me you’ll come to me if anyone gives you a hard time,” he said quietly. I searched his face for clues he might be joking but saw none.

  “Thanks. I think I’ll be fine,” I said. I thought it was sweet of him to look out for me, even though it was clearly unnecessary.

  “No, I’m serious.” He took a long sip of his beer. “I had a partner in the Strike Force, Jill*—you know her a little, I think—and she was the best person I’d trained until you, and they broke her spirit. She was better than the guys, they didn’t like it, and she was never the same. She left the job shortly after. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

  “Okay.” I thought it highly unlikely that anything like that would happen to me. I was tough, I was capable, and surely, any problems Jill, whom I barely knew, had were because she couldn’t take it and must have somehow invited their abuse. Only wimps succumbed to sexism.

  “So come to me with anything, okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks.” I thought I never would, but I appreciated how concerned he was. Later, I once considered seeking his help when the missing women file was floundering badly, but even though our desks were within spitting distance, he remained immersed in his homicide files and I in my own misery. I decided against it, and he didn’t offer again.

  When we were out there doing real surveillance, I lived for the rush of having someone walk perilously close to me in my hiding place and not see me there. I had some awareness, obviously, that the people we were following were dangerous criminals, often looking for the right opportunities to commit serious crimes, but I viewed surveillance as a game to be won. Losing was not an option.

  Surveillance isn’t glamorous. You pee in alleys. You dehydrate yourself to avoid peeing in alleys. You either go hungry for extended periods or grab bad food from twenty-four-hour drive-throughs when you can’t get back to the car and your lunch box. If you carry food into the eye with you, as one of my colleagues
once tried with near-disastrous consequences, dogs and coyotes follow you, and the most feared outcome is that they cause enough distraction around you to cause you to get burned, or found out by the target. You run for blocks at a time, soaking your several layers of rainwear, fleece, and winter clothing in sweat, only to stop short, take up an eye position in the cold and shiver for your hour as the sweat dries and the chill sets in.

  I have stood for hours forty feet aboveground on the branches of a fir tree watching a bank robber’s house, waiting for him to come out. I have crouched still as a statue, spine twisted, underneath stairwells and bushes and garbage cans. I have squatted behind a Dumpster full of rotting food during a summer garbage strike, the Dumpster situated across the alley from a chicken rendering plant on the Downtown Eastside, fighting the bile rising in my throat and the perverse urge to watch the strangely Zen-like cascade of poultry guts fall from a conveyor belt—all in the name of pursuing a violent sex offender whose friend worked there. I lay on my belly for more than an hour in a three-inch-deep, eight-foot-wide puddle of cold water on a patio, soaked to the skin, in November, watching through the knots in a fence as a crook broke into a basement suite. I drank beer from glasses of dubious cleanliness in skid row hotel bars, a table away from some of the most hard-core and violent outlaw motorcycle gang members in town. And I loved every second of it.

  What few people love are the debriefings, referred to as “debriefs.” At the end of every surveillance shift, no matter the time, the team conducts a debrief, usually led by the road boss. At the start of the surveillance, one person is assigned to keep notes of each shift, chronicling every twist and turn of the day. These are reviewed in the debrief, theoretically in the name of reducing errors and helping everyone perform better. Invariably, it descends into personal attacks and petty points made off the backs of the tactically weaker or more junior members of the squad. I tolerated debriefs only because my abilities spared me any unwarranted criticism, but in many ways that made them even more intolerable to me. I tried to defend people whenever I felt a debrief was disintegrating into pure bullying, but those responsible were strong personalities, often in tight with the sergeants or corporals, and I felt powerless as a junior member.

  It took me two years after leaving the Strike Force to stop running red lights and speeding in my own car on a quiet day off, and it’s only through pure grace that I never hurt anyone. I was eventually frightened out of this behavior by my realization that the average citizen couldn’t do these things and I didn’t want to kill an innocent person. What made us special? What made me special? When I had to honestly answer “nothing,” I knew my behavior had to change and I began to notice that sense of entitlement more in others.

  In early 1998, big changes loomed on the horizon for the Strike Force, forcing many of us to make tough decisions. The new chief constable, Bruce Chambers, was hired in August 1997 as an outsider tasked with making sweeping changes to the VPD. He was not welcomed by many of the top executives, and his tenure was very short, culminating in his firing in May 1999.

  Chief Chambers wanted to restructure and send ten Strike Force members to fill vacancies in the Major Crime Section. The openings existed in Robbery, the Sexual Offence Squad (SOS), Drugs, and Missing Persons, which was part of the Homicide Unit. This was a time when gang murders were a significant problem in the city, and that entire section was understaffed. The Strike Force would be downsized from three squads of ten to two squads. We were given the first chance to request one of these Major Crime spots, or we would be placed elsewhere.

  I took some time to decide my next move. Before I left the Strike Force, I worried that I would be lost without my teammates and the elitist feeling the Strike Force affords. I had been lobbying to move into the role of road boss, the person on the squad who leads the entire show, meets with investigators on serious files, and makes all of the decisions in the heat of the surveillance. It is a high-pressure, high-risk position, and the adrenaline—as with most roles in surveillance—is incredibly addictive. If you can road-boss, you can do anything.

  I could road-boss. I had done it a couple of times on lesser files as training. But I realized that because of the particular makeup of my squad, I would get few chances to road-boss if I stayed. My squad had several senior officers who were adequate road bosses, and when the squads merged there would be even more candidates senior to me, so my turn would not come soon. I loved surveillance and had always said if I could do it for the rest of my career, I would. However, like everything else I had experienced in policing to that point, the Strike Force was far from what I had hoped it would be.

  One of the occupational hazards of policing, surveillance, and specifically road-bossing was that to be successful you constantly engaged in “worst-case-scenario” thinking. You always had to ask yourself what was the worst possible thing that could happen next in the surveillance, within some level of reason. For example, if we were following a bank robber, we had to allow him or her to enter the bank and carry out the robbery unless we had intelligence indicating that this person was unusually unstable or was planning to injure anyone inside without provocation. Obviously, this was a tough call to make. As a road boss—and ideally all team members were thinking along these lines, too—you needed to form fluid plans in your mind for what to do if a customer challenged the robber and a hostage-taking ensued or if the target jumped on the counter, gun waving, or myriad other possible scenarios.

  As road boss, you also had to create action plans and be calm enough to communicate them to the team in times of extreme tension. This type of worst-case thinking became habit and poisoned my mind for many years. I suffered from anxiety because I could rarely take an experience at face value; I became obsessed with envisioning what horrible thing would or could happen next and how I might respond. Rarely could I appreciate the present moment. As with many of my policing experiences, I had no idea then how damaging this would be to my mental health as time went on and this style of thinking mixed with the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) I was suffering from.

  I decided to speak to Peter Ditchfield, the inspector in charge of the Strike Force, Gang Squad, and Emergency Response Team. Peter had recruited me for the Strike Force, and he was respectful and supportive of my career. He was one of the few senior managers I had worked with who seemed unafraid to make decisions. Shortly after the restructuring of the Strike Force, he left the VPD to join the Organized Crime Agency of British Columbia.

  “What can I help you with, Lori?” Peter asked when I went to see him.

  “Well, I’m thinking of going for one of these Major Crime spots,” I answered, watching his face for a reaction. At only seven and a half years on the job and the most junior member of the Strike Force at the time, I still felt like a new recruit and was worried that people might view my ambition as premature. “I’m kind of intrigued by the Missing Persons job.”

  “Yes, that would be an interesting job, and I understand they’re looking to add a second detective to the office.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Robbery, SOS, Drugs, and Vice are all fairly senior squads,” he said. I could sense disappointment coming. “I should tell you that several of the others have expressed interest in those, so they would all have seniority over you for them.”

  “Yeah, we’ve all been talking, and I kind of figured that,” I said, trying not to sound overly discouraged. This wasn’t a surprise.

  “However, no one has expressed an interest in Missing Persons, and I think you would do an excellent job there.” He looked at me pointedly. “They need someone to look at a rise in missing women, and that could very well turn into a serial killer investigation. It would be an excellent learning experience for you.”

  “I’ve always wanted to work Homicide,” I told him. “Missing Persons seems like a good place to start, and it would have a lot of real mysteries to hunt down. I think it would be cool.”

  “Do you want to think about it, or should I let them know yo
u’re interested?”

  Homicide had always been the pinnacle of police work in my mind; I just never imagined I could be that close that soon. Missing Persons had traditionally been the training ground for Homicide, with an average stay of two years before you made the jump. Here I was with less than eight years of service and my goal was within reach; it seemed too good to be true. I was idealistic and ambitious, but everything I had wanted in my career to that point had happened—usually ahead of schedule—so I asked myself why this should be any different.

  “Okay, that would be great if you told them I’m interested.”

  I left Peter’s office feeling that mixture of excitement and anxiety that would become all too familiar as my career progressed.

  It did concern me that the VPD was willing to allow someone of my status to head up what could prove to be a major investigation, but again, my naïveté, idealism, and belief in my own competence clouded my judgment. I assumed if I uncovered something truly sinister, the department would bring in bigger guns to help me. I believed I had the ability and the energy to take this investigation and run with it, and what I lacked in experience I would make up for in dogged determination and persistence. I had never been too proud or too afraid to seek help and guidance from more experienced members, and with twenty homicide investigators just down the hall, I figured I couldn’t go too far wrong. And Peter thought I’d be fine.

  Looking back, I doubt that the managers in the Major Crime Section gave any thought to who was joining Missing Persons other than to be glad there was a warm body in the position, someone junior and ambitious enough not to book off sick frequently, someone who would put a bright face on this investigation and assure the Downtown Eastside community that it was in safe hands. This was a pattern that would repeat throughout this investigation, and it took me more than a year to figure it out. Over time, I would see that strategic planning was not at the fore of these kinds of decisions. Policing is a reactive business, and the management of the people doing the work is equally reactive. Long-term planning around running and staffing the missing women investigation was essentially nonexistent.