Stealth Defense - Security Comb

I’ll admit it – I’m new to the world of museums. That’s not to say that I haven’t long been an enthusiastic patron of art galleries and collections of antiquities– I have visited museums and archeological sites around the globe and am a keen student of history. It’s just that until now, as a summer student here at the VPM, I had no idea about the world that lies just under the surface of a museum.

For instance, I naively assumed that what a museum or gallery had on display represented the majority of their collection. I could not have been more wrong. The Vancouver Art Gallery, for instance, only has the space to showcase 3% of their art. That leaves a mindboggling amount of paintings, sculpture and installations sitting in storage away from the public’s view. The same goes here at the Vancouver Police Museum.

Diamond Encrusted "Gold" Knuckles

Our collection is a unique one, and we have 20,000 items in storage. You read that right – 20,000! Weird, wacky and wonderful treasures are stored out of sight of the public- I have handled a bone saw, a crack pipe, a hundred year old bludgeon, a coroner’s apron, a 1950’s police woman’s uniform and a come along – and that was all in one day. We have handcuffs, badges, diamond encrusted brass knuckles, trophies, riot gear, cougar pelts, autopsy tables, mint condition Tommy Guns, even a meat locker full of mugshots! The storage area is a strangely intriguing place to work.

So why don’t we have all of this interesting stuff on display? Why is it that just museum workers like me that get to see it all up close? There are a few reasons:

• Condition: Some of these items need to be kept in the dark in a climate controlled space to prevent further deterioration and to keep them in the best condition possible.
• Space: We are a teeny tiny museum housed in a heritage building, and we simply don’t have places to display all of our goodies all the time!
• Security: As a Police Museum we have a lot of prohibited weapons, not all of which can be safely displayed.
• Funding: The Vancouver Police Museum is a a registered charity that is not affiliated with or funded by the VPD or government. As with most arts and heritage associations we are always happy for more monetary donations to allow us to properly display even more of our fab collection!

Homemade Electric Crackpipe

But, don’t fret, little museum lover! The cool stuff that is in storage isn’t just laying around in the dark – the curator and permanent staff lovingly handle all objects and determine the best ways to preserve and store them so that if (and when!) we can display them they will look their rock star best.

So, just to make sure that you all get a chance to see some of this great stuff, over the course of the Summer I will periodically post photos of some of the strange and bizarre items that I get my mitts on, and share my experiences handling this truly unique collection of our city’s seedier side.  See you around the Coroner’s Court!

Jessica

The 1940 Vancouver City Police Department Annual Report outlined a case with all the drama and sexiness of a Hollywood movie pitch.

First, the set-up: “Frank Henry Johnson, an international jewel thief whose activities have extended from Shanghai, where he was born thirty-five years ago, to Europe, the U.S.A and Canada, arrived in Vancouver from the Orient.”

Then, the meaty body where all the action is and shows the VPD off to its best modern policing advantage: “Due to an efficient and well organized effort in exchanging information Vancouver officers were waiting to greet Johnston and he was arrested as soon as he stepped off the ship. He was held in Vancouver until extradition could be arranged to Palm Beach, Florida, where he was wanted on a jewel theft charge in that city. He was also strongly suspected of the theft of thirty thousand dollars in jewellery from a Vancouver citizen who was visiting Pasadena, California, which took place early in 1939.”

(Sorry, I just need to interject here: Who takes $30K in jewels with them on holidays, even now? And for our information and trivial delight, $30,000 in 1939 is worth over $443,000 in today’s dollars. I can’t help but be cheering on the jewel thief over the rich person who survived the Great Depression with both their jewels and taste for expensive destination holidays intact, but I digress…)

Then comes the third dark act when all seems to go wrong for our heroes in the VPD: “On March 11^th, 1940, Johnston was extradited to Palm Beach and taken there from Vancouver by two officers from that city. In Florida, the prosecution was unsuccessful in obtaining a conviction, and, as under the extradition regulations he could not be again tried on the Pasadena charge, he was returned to Vancouver by United States authorities and was deported to Shanghai early in 1941.”

And finally, redemption and glory for our noble VPD officers and that hint of glamour only movie stars can impart: “During 1940, excepting his extradition to Florida, Johnston was never out of the custody of the Vancouver police while all avenues of investigation were checked in his colourful past, which included the theft of jewels from the famous moving picture star Dolores Del Rio, in 1935, for which he had served his only known term of imprisonment in San Quentin penitentiary in 1935.”

I guess the film would have to end here with a brief text saying what went on to happened to Mr. Johnston. The VPD Annual Report does not say if he was cleared of charges in Shanghai or not. Perhaps Mr. Johnston did survive to steal another day or perhaps he was left to rot in a Shanghai jail. What is known is that Shanghai in 1941 was not one of the safer places to be on the world stage in World War Two.

This blog takes us, if only briefly, beyond the history of general food inspectors and into the role specifically of the Bakeshop Inspector in the years 1912 and 1913. Bear with me now. It is actually quite a fascinating look into pre-World War One Vancouver and even hints at such issues as race, religion and class. And all wrapped up in an insatiable love for bits of bread, donuts and noodles.

The Vancouver Police Department was, in earlier days, responsible for a range of services beyond the normal scope of policing as we now know it. These services included things as diverse as funding and reporting on the dog pound, housing and providing the city’s ambulance service and, for two brief years, offering support to the Bakeshop Inspector. This support included offering a space in the VPD’s 1912 and 1913 Annual Reports where the Bakeshop Inspector’s own report could be published.

Bread products, a staple of Vancouverites’ diet since the city’s foundation, were taken very seriously by the VPD.Indeed, a man named Eugene Plant was hired specifically to spend his working hours investigating the labyrinthine, even criminal, world of “Bread Manufacturers, Confectioners, Café and Hotel Bakeshops, Cones, Doughnuts and Noodle Factories, Biscuit Factories” and as of 1913, “Macaroni Factories”.

Mr. Plant’s reports, please understand, were two pages of small-typed detailed statistics. These statistics, and their associated categories, offer all kinds of little snapshots of our history. In terms of race, for example, at that time being Canadian was unequivocally equated with being British. Out of the 99 bakeshops in operation in 1912, 81 were classified as being “British or Canadian” while the other 18 were “Foreign”. In 1913, the figure was up to 106 total bakeshops. As in the previous year, 81 of those were “British or Canadian” (and I do love how “British” comes before “Canadian”) and 25 (an increase of seven!) were “Foreign”.

Religion poked its head into the picture, too. Sundays, that traditional Christian day of rest for everyone (except servants and ministers of religion) required a special legal exemption for businesses to be open. In 1912, for instance, 33 permits were issued to bakeshops to open for part of the day for Sunday work. In 1913, this was down slightly to 31. Of those, approximately 116 men “work[ed a] portion of Sundays” in 1912 and 102 men in 1913. (Ah, look! Gender makes an appearance. It seems according to these statistics that women either did not work in bakeshops on Sundays – which is untrue – or they were simply lumped under the category “men” as in “manpower”.)

And, of course, there is always class lurking around, placing its dirty little mitts where they ain’t meant to be. Out of those 99 bakeshops in 1912, there were 64 “verbal cautions to workers in unfit and dirty condition or clothing” and 30 such verbal cautions issued in 1913. Either Mr. Plant was not as diligent in his observations in 1913, or more than half of those dirty workers learnt to wash themselves and their clothes in the interim.

There are often moments in studying historic statistics that give you pause for thought at the stories that went into them. Three verbal cautions were issued for “sleeping in Bakeshop” in 1912, with one prosecution and conviction ultimately attained. These particular statistics speak volumes of possibilities: Was it an owner or an apprentice of a bakeshop who didn’t have a house to go to who slept in the shop? Was it someone from another country where the laws were different and shops and houses were seen as the same space? And did Mr. Plant spend his evenings prowling around bakeshops and bread factories with a flashlight on the off chance of catching a napping worker? Incidentally, no verbal cautions were issued the following year. Without disparaging Mr. Plants’ fine character and obvious enthusiastic work ethic, perhaps by 1913 he found himself another evening hobby.

My favourite statistics are, as ever, the really naughty ones. In 1912, one (one!) “Underground Bakeshop” was “in operation” and subsequently closed. In 1913 the “Number of Bakeshops underground” was also one. This later statistic is a mite confusing. Was that a bake shop built underground, or simply as per the previous year, meant to read “Underground Bakeshop”? And what delicious connotations the notion of an underground bakeshop conjures up. A person furtively finds their way to a door. It is knocked upon using a secret and complicated series of knocks. An eye slit opens and a pair of suspicious eyes looks out to check who is doing the knocking. A password is exchanged. The door opens… And finally, bread nirvana… The opportunity to buy illegal bread products from around the world lays before you: Sourdoughs from San Fran, bagels from New York, macaroni from Sicily, pumpernickel from Germany, decadent cream buns from Britain and, for those with the cash, tortillas from Mexico.

Seriously, though, bread was really taken seriously. Of especial concern was its weight. In 1912, 3785 (!) loaves of bread were tested for weight. Imagine, more than 10 loaves of bread were weighed every day (including Sundays) for an entire year and their data carefully recorded. Presumably not just Mr. Plant did the weighing and recording. Of all these loaves, 4.62 percent (or 185 loaves) were found to be “shortweight”. This resulted in eight convictions that year. In 1913, 4055 loaves were tested for weight, or which 4.19, or 170 loaves, were founding to be wanting. This resulted in four convictions for “shortweight”.

And finally, when talking about snapshots and policing, somewhere science needs a mention in the picture. The City Analyst, poor over-worked man he probably was, analyzed at Mr. Plant’s behest, 15 loaves of bread for “Moisture Content” in 1912. In 1913, that number went up to 35 loaves analyzed. I won’t bore you with the specifics, only to say that in 1913 which has the most detailed statistics, the loaves contained between 41 percent and 48 percent “moisture content in crumb”. I have absolutely no idea in heaven or on earth what this actually means. But Mr. Plant thought the scientific statistics on these 35 analyzed loaves of bread important enough to take up almost a quarter of his 1913 report, so we’ll leave it at that.

In 1914, Canada showed how British it truly was by joining other Commonwealth countries in throwing their young men and women against the bombs and the guns of the young men and women of Germany and their allies. The entire nature of policing and police reporting changed as many officers left the police service to enlist and economic cutbacks meant previously printed and bound reports were replaced with typewritten ones on onion paper. Mr. Plant and his bakeshop statistics were never heard of again in the pages of the VPDs Chief Constable’s annual report. Along with policing, many other things changed irretrievably; food standards increased and the people who reported on them became part of a growing and important profession of health inspectors we all benefit from having today. Don’t mind me. I’m just off now to make a piece of toast.

The tradition of going Beyond the Call has very early roots in the Vancouver Police Department.

As far back as 1917, no one believed in the principle more strongly than Chief Constable Malcolm MacLennan. Tragically, he gave his life in the line of duty as he went far beyond the call.

Chief MacLennan was a reformer who fought for his members and for what he believed was right. In 1917, he led a force of 250 officers protecting a population of 100,000 people.

His men worked seven days a week with no time off. He insisted and was granted two days off a month for each officer. He was also the first Vancouver Chief to hire a minority officer. Constable Raiichi Shirokawa, a Japanese Canadian, only lasted a few months in the job before pressure from the Japanese community who thought he was a spy forced him to resign. Chief MacLennan even lobbied politicians for medical treatment for drug addicts instead of treating them as criminals. His pleas fell on deaf ears.

Chief MacLennan was an innovative and highly principled leader who had every intention of making the VPD the best Department in the country. All that came to a tragic end on March 20, 1917. It was on that day he led his men as they stormed an apartment where a barricaded man had already shot a number of policemen and civilians, including an eight year old boy who died from his wounds. To prevent further loss of life, the Chief decided to send a squad into the apartment.

He didn’t believe in sending a man in where he would not go himself, so he led the assault armed only with an axe to break down the door. In the hail of bullets that followed, the Chief fell.

His funeral was attended by his men and thousands of grateful citizens who mourned his passing.

To learn more about this remarkable officer, visit the VPD website at vpd.ca or the website of the Vancouver Police Museum. You can also visit the Police Museum in person to see the new multicultural display, “I Only See Blue” which opens in October.

“The truth is not always pleasing–and it is the truth that during the last ten years the drug evil has required more strenuous handling by the Force in Vancouver than in any preceding years…The illicit drug traffickers of Vancouver have been taught to entertain a wholesome respect for two men of the police force.”

So began a profile of Detectives Donald A. Sinclair and Joseph Ricci in the department’s Annual Report of 1921. Assigned to the city’s first Drug Squad and tasked with suppressing the opium trade, these intrepid men quickly became experts on the trap doors, secret walls and other techniques used to conceal the drug trade from the prying eyes of the police. Thanks to the special skills of these men, finesse and the element of surprise were often adequate to gain entry to these secret spaces in basements and back rooms.

Occasionally, however, more convincing force was required: “the stalwart detective began chopping at the door with might and main, flying chips and heavy thuds from his axe.” Confronted with three separate thick doors, strengthened by heavy timbers, entry was made even more difficult when an alarm of “police” was given; a sentry would push an electric button which would close numerous doors, turn off electric lights and release the trapdoors for quick escape.

“There also enters at all times a considerable element of danger in this class of work, as the drug trafficker oftimes is a drug user and therefore to be closely watched. On their raids Ricci and Sinclair have been trapped in burning buildings, have been shot at and have had to shoot, but they have pulled through and built up a success at drug seizures of which the Force is very proud.”

In less than five years on the Drug Squad, seizures by these two detectives were valued in the Annual Report at “hundreds of thousands of dollars”, which would be the equivalent of millions of dollars today. They followed up this success by going to work on the city’s Dry Squad, using the same shrewd powers of observation and tenacious enthusiasm to curb the city’s illegal alcohol trade during and after Prohibition. Later, they also left their mark on the Morality Squad, clamping down on the “Social Evil” of prostitution.

As with other officers working on crimes of vice, Sinclair and Ricci were selected for their dispositions and ability to “disregard the unpleasantness attached to their work,” according to the 1921 Report. They further demonstrated all the qualifications of good detectives, namely: “shrewdness, reliability, honesty and energy.”

For their invaluable expertise, marked cunning and immovable resolve, these two exceptional Detectives were singled out in 1921 for going “Beyond the Call”.

No one said that becoming a police officer would be easy, but for Constable Lurancy D. Harris the challenges were unique. By 1912, the city had grown to the extent that women were becoming more often both the perpetrators and victims of crime, particularly in the area of vice. Responding to strongly-worded requests by local mission and church groups, Vancouver created a Women’s Division “to render assistance to the young girls and women in the city.” Mrs. Harris and Minnie Miller were hired and assigned to duty with the Detective Department with the rank of 4th Class Constable, becoming the first women in Canada to be sworn in with “full police powers”.

In the course of their duties, they patrolled dance halls, cabarets, pool halls, beer parlours, parks, beaches and “any areas of amusement where women might get into trouble.”

Less than six months into her service, Constable Harris was assigned to the first big case of her career: Lorena Mathews had fled from Oklahoma to Alberta after being accused of killing her husband in what was one of that state’s most sensational murder cases. She fought extradition for two years but when it appeared that Mathews would be captured in Edmonton, she fled instead to Vancouver and was promptly arrested.

Given her unique status as a sworn police officer, Constable Harris was assigned to escort Mathews back to Oklahoma to face charges: a grueling trip of almost 2000 miles. Also, given the notoriety of the case, the traveling pair were treated as celebrities, appearing on the front page of newspapers from Denver to Oklahoma City.

Once Mathews was safely handed off to local law enforcement, Harris began her long return trip. After coming back to Vancouver, Harris was promoted to Sergeant and given authority over the Women’s Department; she retired 17 years later, with the rank of Inspector. Thanks to the trail she blazed, almost 25% of officers in the Vancouver Police Department are women. Harris’ dedication to her duties and to the department has proven to be truly “Beyond the Call”.