Video of homeless men left in doorway by bylaw officers not as it seems, bylaw manager says

It was around 7:00 on Monday night (February 26) when Epik Products Manager Gavyn Gilhooly started to hear some commotion outside of his store.

At first, he thought it was teenagers. When he looked at the camera feed from outside his store he learned it was two bylaw officers and two homeless men.

The security footage shows the officers escorting the men to the doorway of Epik Products, a cannabis dispensary on George Street, then turning and leaving.

One of the men was in a wheelchair.

Gilhooly posted this security footage to Facebook earlier alongside his thoughts on how he perceived the situation was handled by the bylaw officers. The video has been making the rounds in Prince George social media circles this week.

My PG Now spoke with both Gilhooly and the City Of Prince George’s Manager of Bylaw Services, Charlotte Peters, about what happened that night.

“We heard what sounded like a loud conversation outside,” Gilhooly said. “What I hear is a man say something, then ‘we can’t go in there, we are not allowed in there.’ Then I hear [a man] say ‘what about an ambulance?’ And I heard them say ‘they can call one if they want to.'”

After returning from a back room in the shop to check what was going on outside on the security camera the footage was taken on, Gilhooly said the two men from the feed he was watching were inside his store.

“The first thing they ask is if we have heaters or a spot they could warm up,” he remembered. “They were quite insistent they needed heat.”

Gilhooly said he recommended warming shelters just down the street, but the man pushing the wheelchair insisted it was urgent, claiming the second man “was in shock,” and asked Gilhooly to call them an ambulance.

“They said they just needed a place to warm up and maybe get medical assistance,” Gilhooly said, recalling grabbing the standing man a chair and pulling a heater out of the back room for them both, then called an ambulance. He said both men were cold to the touch and shivering.

Paramedics arrived at the store at around 7:30 and left with the men.

“That is about all we had – they told me they were looking for someone to call an ambulance for them and we were the ones that ended up doing it,” Gilhooly said.

This left him with the obvious question – which he asked in his video posted to social media – why did it fall to a cannabis shop to help these men, and why did bylaw leave them at their storefront instead of calling an ambulance themselves, or coming inside?

Through the door, Gilhooly said he heard the officers tell the men the shop could call them an ambulance, and they weren’t allowed to come into the store.

“That is the only interaction that we caught on our end,” he said.

On Tuesday morning, the day after this all took place, Manager of Bylaw Services Charlotte Peters saw the video and connected with both involved officers separately.

She told My PG Now that both officers independently had the same story.

“They were doing a patrol – it was a particularly cold night, they felt it prudent to be out and looking for folks in case people needed assistance getting to a shelter or warming center,” Peters said.

“They located a man on the corner of Third Avenue and George, kitty corner to the needle exchange. He had fallen out of a wheelchair and was on the ground.”

“They went about assisting this guy off the ground and back into his chair… they offered to call an ambulance.”

Peters said the men “were not interested in this point” and asked them not to call 9-1-1, she said the officers then asked if they would like help getting to the Native Friendship Centre, which was the nearest shelter to them at the time.

Again, Peters said the men refused and instead requested to go to “the weed store” – Epik Products.

She said the officers pushed the man in the chair up the ramp and left him in the doorway to the store.

“I think it is that action that has been questioned. What they told me, and what makes sense to me as a manager and having been in a uniformed position in the past, they didn’t want to be seen going into a cannabis shop in their uniforms,” Peters explained. “Ironically enough, the rational behind that is because they can be photographed or videoed and it can end up on social media, people can make negative comments about what they are doing.”

She said both bylaw officers are fairly new in their positions, and in this situation helping the men into the store and explaining what was happening to the employees inside would have been correct.

Aside from that, Peters said “after doing an investigation into the circumstances of this situation, I have no issues with the action they took. I trust the people I work with, I understand the scope of their job, I can tell you from a point of experience they did what they are trained to do.”

“This itself is a great example of the scrutiny their actions are under,” Peters added. “Tomorrow, if this happened, they would probably walk in and ask the employee if they could warm up for a second while they call an ambulance.”

Gilhooly brought up the point that if these men had been dropped off at many other stores downtown they would have been turned away without question, and could have been seriously hurt or worse by the conditions outside.

Peters said if that was the case, the officers would have returned and once again offered help.

Why would these men turn down help from bylaw, then ask for the same help they were just offered from employees inside the business?

Peters speculated “perhaps he required an ambulance but didn’t want it called by from the street because it was quite cold. He recognized the store was open – take me to the store, we can call from there and I can wait for an ambulance from a warmer place.”

“I think it is important to understand bylaw officers are not first responders,” she added.

Gilhooly said he interacts with a lot of Prince George’s homeless community, and that “it does not seem so far fetched to think [bylaw] did not want to spend a lot of time on something they did not think was worthwhile.”

Gilhooly and Peters did speak about the incident in the coming days, but Gilhooly said he did not “personally fully believe” the story he was told.

If everything was as it was presented to him, Gilhooly said he would also not be surprised if the men simply did not trust the bylaw officers if they, or someone they know, had a negative experience with bylaw in the past.

Peters said she understands why some people are concerned that Epik employees were the ones who took the final actions to get these men help.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” Peters said. “I have every confidence [the officers] asked, it is standard procedure. I have every confidence they offered to take them to a shelter – again, that is standard practice. But I also know if someone says no they are not going to go against what that person says. They are not trained to make a medical assessment of this guy… he was coherent, he was conscious, there was no indicator that this was a life and death emergency.”

“If he were unconscious or not able to speak, the circumstances would have been completely different. They would not have even asked, they would have just called an ambulance because that is what they are trained to do,” she said.

“If you look at that video with no sound and no context, it looks really bad,” Peters concluded. “To say they dumped someone at a doorway, that is just not the case.”

“No matter what scary stories you might hear, the people down here are human beings deserving of dignity, care, and compassion, same as anyone else,” Gilhooly said in closing. “Keep that in mind when thinking about downtown.”