Alberta Police Take Down Imperial Stormtrooper

[Disgruntled70sHab]

This comes right on the heels of the New Brunswick massacre ...

Alberta police take down woman, 19, dressed as
Star Wars stormtrooper to promote reopened restaurant

The employee of the Star Wars-themed restaurant had agreed to carry a toy blaster.
Police were responding to reports of someone carrying a real weapon

LETHBRIDGE, Alta. — Police in southern Alberta are being investigated after a restaurant worker in a Star Wars stormtrooper costume who was carrying a plastic gun was forced to the ground and ended up with a bloody nose.

“All the signs say Star Wars. The music that was playing in the parking lot was Star Wars,” said Brad Whalen, owner of the Coco Vanilla Galactic Cantina in Lethbridge.

“If a duck’s a duck, it’s a duck, right. It should have been common sense and it should have stopped there.”

Whalen said the 19-year-old employee of the Star Wars-themed restaurant had agreed to carry a toy blaster and wear the elaborate white uniform of the soldier of the Galactic Empire to get the attention of people celebrating May 4. The day is popular among fans of the movie franchise because of the famous line, “may the force be with you.”

The restaurant, which serves Jabba the Gut pizza and Yoda soda, opened at the end of January and has been struggling due to restrictions put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently open again, Whalen was hoping to get some attention by having a stormtrooper walking out front of the business.

More.

[jkr]

I don't get the reference to the Quebec massacre.

[franko]

May 6, 2020 12:58:43 GMT -5 jkr said:

I don't get the reference to the Quebec massacre.

I think he meant NS . . . pins and needles.

[Disgruntled70sHab]

May 6, 2020 12:58:43 GMT -5 jkr said:

I don't get the reference to the Quebec massacre.

It's all fixed up ... that was my bad ...

Cheers.

[Cranky]

Normally, I support the cops, but this is way over the top.

Meanwhile, NOBODY got fired for the royal screw-up of the RCMP for not sending emergency alerts....for REAL emergency. On the other hand, they can send out alerts at 3 in the morning for some father/mother "abducting" their own child 200 miles away.

[frozone]

Based on the article, it's hard for me to support the cops on this, but I will anyway.

When you get calls from scared civilians who report that they've seen a madman carrying a gun, what should we expect from our cops? When they go check out the scene, do we want them to confirm with 95% certainty that it's a fake gun? Do we want them to play the odds? Or do we want them to confirm that there is no threat beyond the shadow of a doubt? Add to the fact that they couldn't communicate with the lady because of that helmet and she couldn't get on the ground easily because of the costume... it was definitely the worst case scenario for the poor woman because it made her behaviour look suspicious. But I ask again, what do we expect from the cops? I think they did what their protocols call for, and that's not their fault. They didn't shoot her. They didn't tackle her. They didn't use force. Did they have to put her in cuffs? Maybe that's where they could have been more lenient, but that's probably more about protocols and officer safety than anything else.

Also, some of the event descriptions are just plain inaccurate. The cops tackled her? Really? I don't see that at all in the video. Maybe if she had been standing right in front of the restaurant rather than 100 feet away there would have had some marketing context and people wouldn't have been scared. And let's face it, based on the video, the star wars link really doesn't seem to stand out. And unfortunately, gunmen playing dressup isn't a new concept. So without context, it's a very weird outfit to be wearing in the middle of the day. Some of these details are only obvious in hindsight.

So that, imo, is the defense for the cops. Not that they shouldn't feel bad about how it all went down, because they should feel bad. And in the video, it looks like they did because you can see them consoling the woman. But there's others who should feel worse in this. If it really was so obvious that there was zero threat, then the folks who called in the threat should feel bad too. And what about the Owner? Heck, the Owner could have prevented the whole thing from even starting if he would have given her, you know, an actual sign pointing to his star wars themed restaurant. That storm trooper was probably turning away more business than anything. Until the exposure from the incident, that is...

The cops were called to check out a weirdo in a costume carrying a gun. What did the cops do? They yelled and put the individual in handcuffs - no more. I can't support the outrage or the call for cops to assume more risk in the future. They're exposed to risk enough as it is.

[Disgruntled70sHab]

The hardest thing, here, is how hard it is to put yourself in someone else's shoes ... first the girl: She wasn't even a Star Wars fan but she agreed to put on the costume to help promote a local business ... good on her ... however, IMHO, she was far too young to fully understand what was going down ... had it been someone more experienced maybe they'd have figured what was transpiring right away pitched the toy blaster right away ... that said, she came out of it accosted, confused, and in cuffs with a bloody nose all for doing nothing wrong ... I can't tell you how long she'll be traumatized by this, but I'm willing to bet she sure won't forget it ... as for the police, this incident comes off the heels of the New Brunswick shootings ... my neighbour is a Kingston cop and it was only last week he looked at me and said, "there's a lot of bad people out there (Dis)" ... he's just referring to Kingston and his comments came the morning after a standoff between police and a man who said he was armed that happened one street over from ours ... the street was cordoned off; the works ... being a cop can be an extremely thankless job but despite that, they continue to take the dirty work off our hands ... yes, they're getting paid to do just that but they're not paid enough to take the abuse they get on a daily basis ... indeed, every so often they become targets as the New Brunswick case in point; check out the shooting in Edmonton yesterday ... all that said, I'd probably feel a bit different if that was my daughter, but she's not ... while I found what they did to the girl was excessive, it's hard for me to place blame with the Lethbridge police ... the more shootings we have the more paranoid folks get and the police are no different ... that doesn't excuse what happened, more like an explanation as to why it went down the way it did ...

Cheers.

[Cranky]

There has ALWAYS been garbage humans in our society and there will ALWAYS be garbage humans in the future. Be it guns, knives or anything that can kill.

There are 2.2 MILLION PAL gun owners in Canada and probably another million who have guns without a license, but the media and our Chief Moron have gone all out to make it seem they it's tiny amount, marginalizing and demonizing these law abiding Canadians as umm...carriers of death weapons. So given this and another human garbage recent spree, I'm not surprised that a someone dressed in a Star Wars elicited an overreaction....and the cops overreact.

Back in the early 70s, my father and I use to go hunting, nobody got scared or concerned when we took our shotguns out of the car in a residential area in Montreal. Today, back in the old country, still the same thing. There is no...."oh my God, let me call the cops because there is a 10 million to one chance it's a mass murdered".

In my area, there use to be a lot of first generation Europeans. If I took out a hunting rifle bag bag/case in the early 80s, the question was what was I hunting. Today....it would be the SWAT team and buzzing helicopters.

So why am I not surprised?

Sorry, but the cops over-reacted. The woman cop was standing 10 feet away from a damn person in a Star Wars costume. There was no "ambiguity" about what she was looking at. If she and they can't tell the obvious and use common sense, particularly since there was FULL VISABILITY, NO SUDDEN MOTION OR ACT and NO POOSIBLE THREAT to them at that distance. In fact, they had full and utter control of the situation, still, they chose to act like they were face to face with a terrorist.

Then to top it off, they pull in front of the camera to hide their overreaction. Which they probably knew about two minutes into this.

I'm not giving them a pass because it's their $100k a year JOB to use said common sense and assess the situation.

But no worries....nothing will happen to the cops and all of this will evaporate to...."we are just doing our job".