To serve and protect?

PG lives across the street from a neighbourhood pub. It’s a pretty nice place, with good food, and we go there often.

Unfortunately, so do a number of what appears to be homeless people. While they don’t exactly patronize the pub, they do pop into the liquor store that is attached to the pub, and pick up whatever they can get cheaply. Then they go outside, sit on the cement ledge around the corner of the pub entrance, and proceed to drink their day away. Illegally. In public. One person is invariably joined by a few more, sometimes with shopping carts full of cans and bottles (or even all their personal belongings), sometimes with a portable stereo system, usually with more liquor. They get progressively louder and louder, and nastier and nastier. They are not always there, but they are there often enough that they are annoying.

There are a lot of seniors who live in this area, and I can imagine that they would be disturbed by all this going on on the street in front of their homes. I don’t like it, and I don’t even live there (nor am I a senior). It’s hard to walk past these people drinking on the sidewalk, because they end up taking up a great deal of walking space and harassing passersby for cigarettes or money. They also swear a lot, and if my own mother is anything to go by, seniors most emphatically do NOT like that.

A few days ago, I arrived at PG’s place in the middle of the afternoon. As I got out of my car, my ears were assaulted by the tune “Barbie Girl” by Aqua on some street person’s portable stereo. That’s an inane song at the best of times, but to hear it at full blast on a hot summer day is unbearable. PG was up on his balcony, gazing at the owner of the stereo and his buddies, who had obviously been drinking out there for quite a while and were also yelling and swearing at each other over the sound of the music. I yelled up at PG, “How long has this been going on?”

He yelled back, “A while!”

They eventually turned the stereo off and moved on.

The next day, PG and I were returning to his place from a walk up the street for brunch, and this time there were two men and a woman sitting there on the ledge outside the pub. The men were clearly well on their way to being tanked, and the woman seemed to be trying to reason with them. They were all really loud. We gingerly stepped past them and made our way towards his apartment. One of the other apartment residents, an older man, was leaning over his ground-floor balcony railing, watching the proceedings. He and PG talked briefly about how this drinking in public just wasn’t right, and how noisy it always got, and how disturbing it was to the neighbourhood. They agreed that it wasn’t the pub itself, it was these people who seemed to feel that it was okay to sit on the street and drink and disturb the peace.

When PG and I went inside, we watched as the two men began yelling louder and louder at each other, while the woman tried to calm them down. One of the men shoved her, so the other decided to try to strangle him. The woman tried to pull them apart. Fortunately, they did little damage to each other and soon let go and settled down somewhat. Then they began to swear and shout at each other again. Again, the woman tried to keep them apart and calm them down.

In the meantime, PG called the police.

We kept watching, waiting for a cop car to show up. There was more shouting and swearing, but the men refrained from further physical contact, and the woman persuaded them to go somewhere else. Then it was quiet. Twenty minutes later, not one, but two cop cars slowly cruised by. Good timing, officers!

I think PG should keep calling the police every time he notices people out there drinking. I understand that these may be people who are somewhat down on their luck right now, but that still doesn’t give them the right to illegally drink on the street and upset the residents with their loudness and off-colour language. And the police can’t move them along if they don’t know about it. And if the seniors are too nervous to call, well, PG certainly isn’t.

Would it do anything for those unfortunate street people, like help them find homes or find steady jobs or get them off alcohol or get them treatment for their mental issues? No. But it might help the people in this neighbourhood sleep a little more securely at night. And sometimes that’s all you can do.