The Bad Old Days In The Friendly City

So back in the day, when I was a kid, the city council had a lot of influence in this city. They mandated how the cops did they job and to whom they did they job. There was cases like a certain judge that would be found driving so drunk he was bouncing off the curbs on both sides of the street and they would take him home and nothing would be said. They would even send a man out to drive his car home for him so the people next door did not notice. the fact that he would literally always give the maximum fine or jail time to people who drove drunk or where found with drugs did not seem to be hypocritical to the powers that be at the time. My Dad for several years worked as a drug cop and I knew how much drugs where on the streets in this friendly city. Yet on the order of council, the news papers never once mentioned that there was a drug problem here and the only time it got in the paper was then they caught a shipment that was heading threw town to some other place. Moose Jaw is still rather a hub for this activity I am told. It comes here and then is sent out to other places. But that is not what I am talking about, that is just back story.

the council had the power at the time to make literally every parent in the city listen to them in regards to Halloween. If it was on a week day (school day) then it would be moved to the weekend. There was this one time they actually cancelled it. Oh wait, this happened several times and all for the same stupid reasons. Any way, this time it was a rumour that there was going to be a child kidnapped by the "devil cult" in town.

Well I knew the leader of this so called devil cult and that it was no more than some kind of drug induced fantasy. It was not even following the lead of actual devil cults. They had this entire history of people being created by the devil and hunting the God based humans with space ships and laser guns. Sigh...

Any way, they took it so serious that extra man power was put on the police presence in town (lots of tax payers funding overtime) and hourly radio messages for several days in a row, not to mention a front page article on the issue of how this was such a serious threat.

Months later it turns out that the stupid ass teen girl that started the rumour was just out to see what would happen if it got spread around. There was actually for several days before and after Halloween cops all over the place looking for satanic worshippers with rope and knives and stuff. Sigh. Not to mention dozzens of CB radio owners driving around reporting every last teen they saw out after dark to the cops on Channel 9. BTW there is still a sign that says CB Radio Monitored Channel 9 just on the edge of town - they never took it down and no one has monitored that channel in 30 years.

But this was a time and age when a church had so much influence in the community that they could get people elected to public office. So it's no wonder why there was all this morality crap going on at the time. Like for example every last place that sold a playboy was visited by the cops at random many many times a week.

They have even ran porn shops and adult toy shops out of town. The one was kind of spectacular. They had church goers parked outside the store 24/7 looking for people going in to the store and they would take a photo of the car, licence plate and person and tell them they where going to be spread around town "so the people know who the perverts are". LOL. If I was only kidding this would more funny. But sadly this is the history of this town.

To this day stores that sell adult materials are visited on occasion by cops saying shit like "it's not legal to sell this stuff" or "you are breaking the law". When asked what law that is and where is it in the criminal code, they of course can't tell you. Sigh. But they try.

A friend worked in a porn shop at night and had a death threat by a bunch of snot nosed kids who tried to just walk in. A cop showed up to tell him to "stop calling the cops". Sigh...

On that note there was not so long ago when I was living at the Slade a large party at the Stad apartments. There was about 100 or so people drinking and yelling and blasting music and tossing bear bottles at cars. Well I phones the cops, the people on both sides of me called the cops. No cop ever showed up. I called a 3rd time and was told "stop calling". Sigh...

This is the same department that when I showed up (like 20 years ago) to the police station to file an assault complaint against a person, nothing at all was done. See I can't remember the cops name buy oh well. The thing is I told him flat out that I was right in the line of site of a video surveillance camera at the time. My friend told of the happening and so on. Then about 2 months later I was told "there was no evidence so we dropped the case". Well I phoned the chief of police and complained about this. He was shocked to hear about the camera thing as it was not mentioned in the report at all. My hand written report of what happened to me was not in there as well. Turns out the cop was friends with this menace to society. The fact that people he worked with had refused to work with him ever again and that he ended up hitting a 90 something year old man with a truck one day kind of helps my story here.

But things have all so slowly gotten better. The back room deals have slowed down and the cops are almost to a point where they are generally trusted. Although I think it's all the community work they do that caused that. So perhaps before I drop dead this city will be to a point of being normal like other cities.

BTW in the 1920's the cops ran all the crime in town (organised crime that is) like the hookers and the gambling and so on. They (most of them) got arrested by the feds one day for selling stolen goods. So you can see that it has been a slow progression to getting to be a normal city not run by criminals or the morality warriors. Now if we could just get to a point that millions of tax payers bucks would not be spent to keep a freaking hockey team happy, then we could call ourselves a normal city. Speaking of back room deals, the dang arena exists where is does because of that kind of thing. Sigh.

Anyways things will improve, they have too - Surprisingly Unexpected as it may sound.