"Riots" in Vancouver.
Very good live radio, helicopter and on the ground reporting tonight, when the Vancouver team played for the Stanley Cup.
Tens of thousands who came to view outdoor screens of the game were caught up in a scene of a few square blocks of chaos.
Vancouver lost the game and as that became clear, protests began. A teddy bear was set on fire, a police car was overturned and set on fire and over the next three hours four or five prominent buildings had their windows broken and some bold souls, mostly twenty year old males, entered and looted boxes of makeup.
As of now they have not gained entry to the Future Shop where the stereos and TVs are.
I think it is finished, the people who came into town to celebrate the Canuck victory tonight, hyped by the excellent marketing of hockey in Vancouver have hopefully found somewhere to spend the night. The drunk ones might have a more difficult time.
This police confrontation with the people turns my thoughts to why this is the chosen outlet for those hockey fans -- is it simply that the system allows no other form of expression?
It will be a difficult morning for people who work in the downtown core, but again that is four square blocks. They will see broken windows and vomit on the street.
I hope that they will also see that this is a successful use of police to keep the peace, and that things did not get out of hand.
Successful deployment of hundreds of police, a dozen mounted police, a few police dogs and perhaps twenty riot cops with shields, and some smoke bombs, flash-bangs and pepper spray bombs were able to turn away the crowd of some thousand or so onlookers and photo opportunists and vandals.
So there should be no call for police escalation.
Posted by: jonku | Jun 16, 2011 4:10:13 AM | 67
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Now compare that with what I heard Don Cherry tell the puffmaster flash, Rick Cluff, this morning on the local CBC, which was that it was all the fault of left-wing pinko governments and their left-wing pinko media enablers that won't let the police break heads and take care of everything. Cluff, of course, let it all go and instead extolled the virtues of Cherry's suit jacket from last night which just gave the latter an excuse to take a shot at gays.... Seriously.
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10 comments:
Did CBC Coverage of the Vancouver 2011 Riot last night cause more Rioting?
"Great" coverage from the CBC Vancouver castle tower, with their reporters standing on the battlements, but really, did Metro Vancouverites need to see the real-time rioters destroying public and private property for three hours afterwards?
Its not like the majority of Vancouver Canuck fans, who went into the downtown core to celebrate hockey, were walking around with television sets on their hips, except for those black balaclava thugs who broke into London Drugs and other stores during the melee after the game was over.
With the CBC coverage, were more young people encouraged off their couches at home, to cross the line into civil disobedience, even though they weren't even downtown when all hell broke loose?
Or was Twitter the loose cannon that organized the rioters?
Twitter is defined as "Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface."
Social is defined as "An informal social gathering, esp. one organized by the members of a particular group: "a church social"."
Last night started out as a social gathering of many and ended up with a few being a mob rioting.
Was the cause, Twitter or CBC?
Hi RossK.
I gotta tell ya, I am so disgusted with what happened last night in Vancouver, I will never wear my Canucks jersey again. To me that jersey is now synonymous with rioting assholes and entitled, poor-loser sucky-babies, as it probably is to the rest of the world. This was so much worse than '94: thanks to the miracle of social media, images of rioting jerks in Canucks jerseys were flashed around the world at lightning speed. The Washington Post, which generally doesn't know Canada exists, had a story up about it before the mayhem had even ended.
And don't even get me started about the brainless cretins who stood around and said/did NOTHING while all the commotion was going on.
Sorry about the rant, but wow. Vancouver sure has changed since I lived there.
Watching the live feed last night, JJ, I was rather impressed by the number of people who did take individual action, calmly relieving drunks of the hockey sticks and skateboards they were smashing windows and cop cars with and disappearing back into the crowd, or standing in front of store windows.
What was required was probably a group action against the rioting, a simple chant taken up by sufficiently large numbers, but most there were quite young and were obviously just stunned by the whole thing.
A sport which features players being taken off the ice on stretchers and whose most prominent spokescretin regularly conflates those players with "the troops" resulted in crowd violence - quel surprise.
Via DJ : Understanding Vancouver's Hockey Riot
Here is Don Cherry on CBC. http://don-cherry.tumblr.com/
When young people throughout the world are risking their lives on the streets defying police for their rights, Vancouver's youth decide to break windows to steal perfume (or beating up on those few brave enough to try to stop the violence).
Anon-At-The-Top--
Your questions are major themes of M. Leiren-Young's linked-too piece in the post.
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JJ!!!
Sorry something so dumb and depraved brought you out of comment retirement.
I wasn't here in '94....The closest I got was Godzilla Salming's Thompsonesque reportage....Was this really worse?
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Alison--
Reports from hospitals and paramedics confirm what you said about folks helping out.
The larger issues that you raise are important ones...I wonder...How many of the folks involved have ever actually played the game seriously - funny how direct experience in something tempers one fanaticism....
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Thanks Anon-O-Don...Have linked to it, as much as it pains me to do so.
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Fair enough Anon-At-The-Bottom - thanks.
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Loved the little homophobic joke at the end of Cherry's remarks. A man as classy as the rioters.
An almost lifelong Canadiens fan, I gave up on professional hockey a while ago - too many teams in too many hot places, etc... and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But my son came back from school in Montreal this winter rhapsodizing about playing pick up hockey outdoors in an east end park. No hitting, just a lot of swearing, laughing and playing - he quit league hockey when the hitting started.
Now I can't wait to visit him in the winter and check out a game. I don't think I'll need the Canucks, playoffs, Don Cherry, riots or rioters to have a good time.
Alison - As I watched more news on the thing, I was encouraged to see that at least a few people tried to do the right thing (even if they did get the crap beat out of them for their trouble). But that didn't make me feel any less queasy about the majority of posing, leering cretins who were clearly enjoying the mayhem.
The article you link to is an interesting take, but I have a hard time believing that Intermission Clown Don Cherry's sphere of influence is so vast and virulent that he can cause riots to break out. I also reject out-of-hand the article's half-baked notions about ultra-nationalism, consumerism, and all the other evil isms that were supposedly the root cause of the riot. If that was true, the Olympics would have had far worse riots since they're just as consumer-driven and far more nationalistic.
No, what happened on Wednesday night was a large gathering of entitled little snotnoses from the burbs who went downtown in their $100 Canucks jerseys for the express purpose of getting drunk & raising shit. I have no sympathy for their "angst": every one of them deserves a big time asskicking.
Over at House of Infamy, Koot has posted some of the Best-ever comments about why the riots happened.
It's the best analysis of British Columbia as it really is ... and I wish the pundits would stop being so amazed that violence erupted ... I mean, stop and listen.
http://houseofinfamy.blogspot.com/
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The riot that took place in Vancouver on June 15 - 2011 over a hockey game was a much
bigger insult to Vancouver than anyone could imagine.
Teenagers do stupid things sometimes,
I speak from experience, I was a teenager myself at one time and I did things I'm not proud of,
but I would never expose myself on national TV only to wimp out via media for the entire
world to see.
I have observed some dweeby looking looters walking out of stores with merchandise in hand
and smilling as thay looked right into the cameras.
In spite of what some optimists say about Vancouvers tourist industry,
the facts are that the tourist industry is not doing very well at all.
The year round damp rainy weather dose not attract peaple from abroad and to make matters
worse, Vancouver is always introducing some tough new overly protective by laws that
discourage peaple from coming to Vancouver.
The all out indoor smoking ban has literally killed all of the nice quiet cocktail lounges and
replaced them them with noisy sports bars that only do a good business when a major
sports event that takes place like the hockey game that reduced Vancouver to a war zone
aftermath.
Peaple have to make their own fun in the ( No Fun City )
This is what happens when theres too many restrictions.
My only regret is that Vancouver wasn't burned to the ground.
http://garyliemen.blogspot.com/
www.etsy.com/shop/garyliemen
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