Sabresfansince1980 wrote:
This actually ties into the anarchist thread I started in the politics forum. Many of these idiots were not even hockey fans or near the arena because they cared about the game. They pre-planned this crap days before. They just wanted to take adavantage of the setting, win or lose, in order to burn, break, and steal stuff.
This shouldn't be any more of a black eye on Vancouver than it is for other Canadian cities that have rioted after hockey games. L.A. and Boston have had riots in recent years as well, but I think Canadian police are not very prepared for these types of incidents. Vancouver PD knew damn well that there was a potential for this mess regardless of how the game ended. It's a failure on two points...
First, it's a failure to have an effective criminal intelligence unit that could monitor the potential for violence. Odds are high that there was some planning and therefore warning online for VPD to take notice of. These idiots, like some anarchists for example, coordinate online. If VPD had a criminal intelligence unit that was paying attention, they should have known what the threat level was.
Second, whether they were prepared or not, they had nowhere near enough officers on hand to deal with the crowd. It only takes a small group of true idiots to get things started, and then the middlers escalate by watching, encouraging, yelling at police, and taking photos and video of the mess. I know VPD had officers visible during the series, interacting and being friendly with fans. That's great, but they also need to have enough of a police presence to deter or to react quickly to the early stages of a disturbance before it reaches the level of a riot. Based on this incident and riots before, it appears to me that Canadian police either don't have the mindset (afraid of being cast as storm troopers), the knowledge base from intel gathering, or training to deal with large disturbances or riot scenarios.
It's really inexcusable to have such a predictable event take place with such ineffective police response.
How do you know they planned this?