i went to a nice dinner at my firefighter friend and his wife's place tonight...i gave donna a hug afterwards on the patio and rick and i walked to near where my car was parked. it was nighttime, just after midnight...we talked for a second on the sidewalk before i would go to my car...it is a pleasant middle class, usually quiet neighborhood... ...a convoy of five cars slowly passes by on the road, very slowly...too slowly... they were vietnamese...we have gang troubles with them in calgary...and i taught highschool and i knew...they got to a couple of houses further...after one of them in the window gave us a kind of a finger...we watched them only...at the end of the block they started a u-turn... rick, ever the alert fireman is rushing back to the side of his house to the back entrance of the house saying...now shane...get in the house...now... donna's in the house...we percieve through the front windows they are stopping right in front...we turn off the lights...they would get out of their cars...probably 25 of them...then get in again after a few moments...after 5 minutes they left...rick by then had called the police...they weren't interested, repeating a real pattern that rick had been in before in calgary...the CPS (Calgary Police Service) will often decline to have anything to do with gangs, especially vietnamese...rick witnessed a beating they did a couple of years ago and the police never came...he was told later in HQ that they often don't because they're frightened of them too, so they like to just wash their hands of it... so they didn't respond to rick's call for help...after 5 minutes gone they all rolled back in again, the cars, phalanx like, one car beside another blocking the road...they then stopped again, their headlights shining on ricks house... i called for help this time and still the police wouldn't come... they kept repeating this pattern of intimidation about 3 times...we went through about an hour and a half of their terrorizing...then they left again...i had called the police a second time myself... after 15 minutes maybe longer, a police van came ...(rick lives only half a mile from a station)...we explained the situation to them...then they offered to escort me behind my car for a number of miles till i got home... donna and i had never encountered such a thing before...with the police not responding, you can't imagine the feeling... one friend of mine had a lebanese gang through rocks right through her living room window... i had worked at police headquarters in calgary as a security officer for the canadian corps of commissionaires...i used to listen to the amount of ethnic gang crime in calgary on the radio dispatch on my belt...i was not armed...one night the jail police let a man go, giving him his baseball bat back...down to the lobby where i am, alone and unarmed at 3 in the morning with two locked doors behind me and he's carrying his baseball bat on his shoulder! but this was worse terror ...the gang was huge and they just decided to terrorize us because they saw us chatting on the sidewalk... when i was a kid you could roam all over calgary in safety, and i did... now you can't...we have 6 times the amount of violent assaults as santa barbara...this is a statistical fact... on my dispatch i would listen...every friday and saturday night a different gang was chaining somebody...one night it was lebanese...tonight it was vietnamese... and the liberal government made it all possible and probable... and chretien dillydathers... i'm pretty shaken up...so give me a break...will you? shane
