quote:
Originally posted by Sherasi:
...the police ignored the situation because the victims were 'riff raff' from the bad part of town.
I am so disgusted with this case that I have stopped watching the news. It's everywhere all day on Canadian news.
The human species is not the loveliest. That this ugly disgusting creep is being showered with attention will only attract other ugly disgusting creeps to his particular métier.
I am also completely disgusted with the blame that is being assigned to police and social services.
These women did not deserve to die because they led a sinful lifestyle. Prostitution is not illegal in Canada. But it does attract a disproportionate number of substance abusers.
Substance abusers have a hard time holding jobs. So they drift into self-destructive lifestyles.
Social services ("welfare") cannot provide people with sufficient money to support their habits. It only provides food and shelter and clothing. Yet when the tragically naive see the pathetic addicts lying on the pavements in certain parts of Vancouver, they join the outcry: "What is the matter with our social services? These people are homeless!"
Yet all of them get welfare. They make a deal with a landlord, sublet at a cheap rate to someone else, and use the kickback for drugs. But of course that is not nearly enough to support even a decent alcohol habit. So petty theft and prostitution is what they turn to.
Since they either are 'homeless' or live in filthy, crowded 'squats' they have no facilities for keeping their clothing and their bodies clesn, and no place to prepare food so they live on junk food they buy at corner shops. This also contributes to their ill health and chronic fatigue.
A lot of people - many of them women, many of them friends or relatives of some of the dead women -- are getting on the bandwagon. The media seems to be willing to give them unlimited access to cameras and microphones. A lot of what they say is drivel. X, a victim of P., was a wonderful human being. Generous to a fault. Loved her children passionately. Abandoned them, but loved them. Some of those who are related by blood to victims are trying to prepare legal cases for what they hope will be huge legal settlements from police, the city, the province -- anyone whom they can 'blame' for the 'neglect' the victims suffered.
I have lived in Vancouver for over thirty years. I have seen it move from a city in which drug users were jailed for vagrancy and prostitutes of both sexes were charged and sometimes jailed. Actually the laying of charges was just a form of harrassment - they were often released.
There has been a steady drift toward permissiveness. Prostitution is now completely tolerated. It is the citizens of the neighborhoods into which they congregate who must try to use legal actions (i.e. not physical violence) to move them along. Children on their way to school have reported seeing sex acts performed by the prostitutes and their users. It's the same with drug use. And locals can do little.
As a result open drug use, flagrant behavior, open prostitution, and exposure of the young to these vices is (I can only estimate by what I have seen) more than twentyfold what it was under the old, 'bad' system.
One 'reform' after another - needle dispensaries, free clinics which give out antibiotics to people riddled with STD's (and quite typically these people will not complete their perscription; the result of that is a highly dangerous situation in which antibiotic-resistant strains of all sorts of things, from staphylococcus from infected needle injection sites right on up - are becoming prevalent in the public hospitals.
The emergency wards are filled with stoned and drunken people every evening and all through the night. They come in, bleeding from fights or are brought in by others, and they are so demanding and obnoxious that ER staff often find it best to let them jump the queue so they can get them out again, and as a result those with other than self-induced health problems are left to the last.
Yet these drug addicts and prostitutes, their pimps, their customers -- are depicted as poor unfortunates, not in any way responsible for their plight.
Those who are responsible, it seems, are the police who did not monitor their every back-alley deal, to protect them; the social services who could not cure their addictions without commitment and effort on the addicts' parts; and of course the grasping taxpayers.
Here is a hypothetical case. Suppose a man in his forties, a chain-smoker since early teens, a junk-food junkie, grossly overweight and a heavy drinker, who has been warned time and time again to clean up his lifestyle, finally dies of heart disease. Would we not see him as a victim of his own bad choices? We might praise his virtues, but we would not excuse his vices. We would not blame the doctors who 'failed' to get him to quit smoking and over-eating. We would not blame the police for not monitoring his overeating, and protecting him from exploitative restaurants. We would not allow his survivors to sue the city for not keeping him away from his vices.
Those women knew the risks they were undertaking. It is a well-known fact that killers pick on prostitutes more than any other segment of the population for their victims.
The reason? Not because police don't care.
Because the prostitutes lead such irregular lives and have such poor impulse control that it would take assigned police three shifts a day to give each of them the full-time protection they would require to be kept safe. And when police hang around too closely, they complain, and insult the police, because it's bad for business.
Here's a question for friends and families of the victims: where were you when your loved one was at such great risk?
The BBC with its customary neutrality and respect of legal process has been carefully saying 'alleged to have murdered'. 
That's funny tho, because I've just learned from a fellow employee who's from the UK that your news is strictly factual and no one makes any sort of personal comment while on the air, like they do here.
