Mayfair

What’s Next?

A couple of weeks ago now I resigned by job. Like any life decision like that there are a lot of reasons but in the end I was feeling really tired and in some ways burned out. Wendy’s depression is worse now than it has ever been and that takes a toll on the entire family (she’s making an ugly, ugly transition to yet another stronger anti-depressant without being weaned off the old one right now). While the job wasn’t burning my out, life was taking a toll on all of us and we have a very hard time getting treatment in Saskatchewan, heck, we can’t even get her old clinic to transfer her medical files to the new doctor.

After I made it public that I was looking for a new challenge, several serious job offers came in and we looked at some opportunities that would change our financial position substantially and one in particular that would give me and the family an opportunity to travel and live abroad. Another offer was a great job in a particularly evil company. Not quite big tobacco or working for the GOP but evil enough that I am sure that all go for supper together. I have lived in the prairies my entire life and the opportunity to raise Mark and Oliver in a different culture and worldview was something that I wanted to do since Mark was born. I am also getting to the age where I think a little more about retirement each year and this would give us a chance to retire with a little more money in the bank. While the Salvation Army treats me quite fairly, as a non-profit, it can’t compare to the compensation of evil publically traded companies. Whatever my job decision was going to be, I had planned to wrap up work here last Wednesday and start at my new job in late September. I was asked to reconsider my decision and stay here as well but at the time, I was at peace with moving on to new challenges.

It wasn’t a easy decision to make as we balanced Wendy’s access to treatment, what was good for the boys, what our goals were as a family, and also some pretty strong ties to Saskatoon, particularly the core neighbourhoods of Saskatoon. During this time of evaluation, there was a murder (more) that bothered me deeply. I know both the victim and the accused from work and while I was processing that death, we had a death at work. After hours of questioning by the police, crime scene investigators and major crimes (don’t worry, it was a death from natural causes), I drove our former chaplain up to St. Paul’s Hospital as he was off to see a dying friend. While I tend to drive up 19th Street to avoid the traffic on 20th, I drove back down 20th Street that night. I have never seen 20th Street like that. I counted 14 girls clearly working the stroll. Three of them looked to be underage. Guys were on the street corners as I watched 2 drug deals go down. I know that isn’t typical for 20th Street and was like that because the Saskatoon Exhibition was in town which brings in a lot of out of town customers. As I left the Centre that night around 10:00 p.m., I turned back up 19th and as I was turning the corner, I watched a taxi complete a brazen dial-a-dope transaction at the phone booth across the street from the Centre. Of course the prostitutes were on 33rd Street that night (Wendy later told me that there has been as many as four in the Safeway parking lot on shift). I got home, grabbed a Diet Coke, grabbed my Moleskine and started to jot down some notes for how things had changed since I started working at the Salvation Army in Riversdale and on the west side.

What we do at the Salvation Army Community Services is both really simple in concept and really complex in how it is executed. The concepts are pretty easy. We provide meals, food, budget management help, and emergency assistance to those that need it. The nuances of distributing those goods, paying for it, being paid for it, determining need and the appropriate response is what is so complex. It takes a lot of staff, volunteers, officers, and money to make it happen.

The operational side I have a firm grasp on, it is that simple stuff that was troubling me. The Centre does a really good job at doing what we do but what haunted me as I went to bed that night was, are we doing the right things?

I came in and talked with some other managers about what I was thinking. I think the Salvation Army Community Services does a lot of really good things but Riversdale has changed. While getting the Mumford House ready for it’s opening, I drove a lot between the two locations and on every corner around the women’s shelter, there are girls working on the corners… at 8:30 a.m. Even during the opening of the Mumford House I watched girls on the corner. While I have been complaining night and day about prostitution in Mayfair, girls are working the streets in Confederation Park and even as far west as Pacific Heights. 90% of the girls on the streets are being trafficked by a variety of sources. They are moving out of the stroll (women can be as territorial as the men and if they don’t come up with a new territory, they get beaten if they don’t bring him the money).

It’s just not the prostitution. It’s the drugs, the increase in violence, and the sense of hopelessness from not being able to get ahead. 13.2% of residents in the core neighbourhoods of Saskatoon don’t have a grade nine education. (including 21.0% of those in Riversdale and 18.4 of those in Pleasant Hill). While 11% of Saskatoon is made up of one parents families, 24 % of Riversdale households are single parents families. Not to get all Dan Quayle on you or anything but Wendy and I have a hard time raising kids on two salaries and very little child care costs (we work opposite hours). How much harder is it to go alone? A sign of disenfranchisement many households feel, only 13% of Pleasant Hill residents turned out to vote in the last civic election (vs. 50% of voters in Briarwood). Of course one doesn’t need to channel the spirit of Thomas Homer-Dixon to realize how problems can be even more complex than the combined statistical analysis… and believe me, the stats show a complex problem.

We are left with two alternatives. During this time, I finished up an internal proposal to go to the Salvation Army for a new facility. It’s no secret that Saskatoon needs more shelter beds. In addition to more beds, it redesigns how we accommodate our residents so they are more comfortable and guys can have a better rest. More youth rooms, more mental health rooms, a wing for grumpy old men, transitional rooms, a small half gym, computer facilities, a coffee shop/drop in space, and lots of green space for our guys. It’s not perfect, I couldn’t figure out how to slide a go-cart track past the bureaucracy but will we see.

As I finished it up, I realized that what we were proposing a dam and levy system for many of our residents. While they were at the Centre, they would be safe and secure and maybe even get ahead of the game but when many left, they get swamped by what is outside of the Centre. There is value in creating safe spaces but eventually you have to leave and go out in the real world. Too high of rent, too low of income, stuck in a flophouse, surrounded by drugs, forced to take a bad roommate, mental health and addiction problems and trapped in poverty. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that life should be hard at times but the obstacles confronting our clients are considerable. So I was left with an architectural solution (increase the size of dorms to X number of dorm beds and even more private rooms for grumpy old men and then keep building and building and building) or we figure out a way to help our clients live back in the community amongst the alcohol, drugs, violence, and exploitation. By doing so, we would also be changing the character of those neighbourhoods. Of course of the two, the second option is a lot harder to do.

As I was thinking about this, I was at the Front Desk the other night when a women came in. The Emergency After Hours worker was swamped with other clients and the women was upset and crying. I took her into a room off the office, left the door open (and it’s on camera) and started to see what she needed. She needed accommodation and I asked a couple of questions which she was quite forthcoming in answering. The details aren’t that important but drugs, acquired brain injury, prostitution to make ends meet, a couple of bad tricks. As the staff found a place for her at a local women’s shelter, I had two thoughts. One this women in someone’s daughter and secondly as her face and neck had the signs of being beaten up by a john, will she escape this cycle first or will she end up being another statistic?

So what can I do? What can we do? I’ll get into this in a lot of detail later but there is a lot that we can do about this. I think that is what kept me here, there is stuff that I can do as an individual, I can do within the organization, and we can do as an organization of other community based partners. As Margaret Mead once said, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Losing My Religion

Aug 29th, 2010

by Jordon Cooper.

32 comments

A lot of you have asked why I have stopped posting about items of faith and Christianity here and the reason is pretty complex. First of all after reading around 5 books a week for 15 years or so, I no longer have the time or the desire to read that much. Much of that reading was theological or about church life and what has been said on the topic for me has been said. I still get probably 100 books a year to review and most of them are just rehashing what has been said and said and said again. On the occasional time when I can force myself to enter into Scott’s Parable, I see the same book, just written by different authors. I know I am taking some shots at some friends here but it seems like a lot more reflection and a lot less publishing may help everyone.

It goes for me as well, if I don’t have anything to say, I am not going to log in and write anything. To paraphrase a good friend of mine who used to joke, “If you want a better sermon, get Max Lucado to write better books”, so in other words, if you want a better blog, write better stuff for me to link to.

The more serious reason is that I struggle with the distance between neighborhood/community and the church. I have read and heard pastors say that they need to vision cast (what a geeky and churchy phrase) or sell their church on the idea that they need to be a part of their community. This is a phrase I have heard for years but I never realized how strange it was that the church had stopped being part of the community. Now of course with more and more churches wanting more real estate, they are literally moving outside of their cities and towns so they can create more programs that compete with and pull people away from the communities they are apart of. The fact that we have to “vision cast”, sell, manipulate, or coerce our congregations to be part of the community, in fact, we had to come up with new church growth terminology to describe what should be our natural reaction as human beings… (I’m missional, your missional, we are all missional) that is our responsibility to make our local communities a better place for everyone to live in.

Years ago I listened to a series of podcasts by Todd Hunter and Dallas Willard in which Hunter talked about one of the metrics his church used was how far people were travelling to get to his church without realizing the impact it had on local communities. While that may represent one extreme of the equation, it was quite similar to what we experience as a family in finding a church in Saskatoon. There is a pull to be a part of the church community, which church leaders tend of think of as a true or at least superior community which puts us in tension with my commitments to other things that are going on in my geographic community. While I agree there is a need for involvement in the church, our local communities the need is often just as pressing. So I have kids clubs that interfere with Mark taking karate, small groups that only work for people who work 8-5 (and definitely not for those who like Wendy and I who are work from 7:00 a.m. when I go to work to 10:45 p.m. when Wendy walks in the door from work). I have prostitutes on my street, a brothel on my block, guys grinding drugs across from the local elementary school, the Terror Squad working out a local restaurant and bar and I keep hearing that my number one priority needs to be a small group in a church.

I follow some pastors and church leaders on Twitter and I realized it’s a giant irrelevant echo chamber where the tweets and retweets reinforce what they believe. I haven’t lost my faith in Christianity, I am just in doubt that the church is an accurate representation of what it represents anymore. I was in a room of pastors earlier this year and they were still talking about media in worship, ancient future song writing, and all sorts of peripheral things about church life with great interest and not one of them mentioned life in their community. A friend of mine sent me a sermon the other day on YouTube to check out as it would cure what ailed my soul. The stage looked like it was stolen from David Letterman and I am pretty sure it was meant to be a copy and after watching the sermon, I realized that he was speaking in the same style that Vince does while pitching Slap Chops. Sadly not only did I used to speak like that in public but so do so many other pastors I know. I realized while watching this that the church had become a parody of itself. The Emperor has no clothes.

I realized that I no longer see most churches any differently than Kiwanas or another service club but this one has higher fixed costs. Are all churches like this? I don’t think so. One of the great experiences I have had in life was spending a bit of time with Dave Blondel and the Third Space. Both Wendy and I have said that we would be quite comfortable attending a church lead by my friends, Scott Williams, Randall Friesen, Pernell Goodyear, Kim Reid or Darryl Dash but those kinds of churches and those kinds of pastors aren’t that easy to find. The problem for me is when I see the kind of church that is engaged in creative ways in it’s community, it’s awfully hard to go back. When I was down in Maple Creek, I did some pastoral work with people. We literally put on some orange Salvation Army vests, went from flood ravaged house to flood ravaged house and chatted with flood victims. Everyone in that community knew the Salvation Army Corps officers, Captain Ed and Charlotte. Every last person. When he was in Saskatoon, he was everywhere in the community as well. If he can do it, so can other churches and their leaders. If Wendy, myself, my staff, and a bunch of volunteers can work amongst Saskatoon’s poorest, so can everyone. What we do isn’t brain surgery (umm, except for my staff, you are all brilliant… underpaid but brilliant) but a compassionate response to the community around us. Instead I find churches that are isolated and focused on themselves. Too many times over the last couple of years to hear a sermon on parenting, the need for leadership, church growth or again, church growth. Did I mention I hear a lot of sermons on the need for church growth. Sadly I am not alone. A good friend of mine recently left his long time church and said, “I’ve learned all I need to learn from the pulpit on the need for church growth”. It’s like the church has lot’s it’s reason for existence and is just looking at how to keep paying the bills. Yet sadly in a lot of communities, the need for the church and it’s redemptive message has never been greater.

The other thing is that while I hate the overuse of the concept of “a dark night of the soul”, it has been an extremely lonely time spiritually for me. God was extremely distant and I don’t really have a lot of people to talk to about this stuff. The praxis of my spiritual life was solid but there was no connection. After exhausting my traditional options, I sought out a Roman Catholic spiritual advisor who I spent a lot of time talking with. He was the one who said, “It’s not a dark night of the soul, it’s a wounded soul that I was dealing with.” A co-worker once said to me, “We aren’t normal. We are so desensitized by what we see sometimes, we aren’t bothered by what should bother us.” I thought about it a lot and realized that my job had changed me deeply and for the worse and I wasn’t equipped for what that has done to me. As an INTJ, I am already an underdeveloped feeler which at times makes it hard to fully understand what I am feeling. Looking at life from a rather cold and analytical mind has it’s advantages but it always makes it hard to look at life when the problem isn’t a rational one and as any of the staff that I work with will say, rational behavior can often be in short supply with what we see some days. Toss in that the amount of violence and death we have seen this summer, it has taken a toll. It seems like every murder and suspicious death in the city has been connected to someone I know and it’s hard. The first thing I am doing in the morning is dealing with another one. Jaded or not, it has had an impact and those add up a little bit.

As my spiritual advisor and I have talked, I shared that when God reveals himself to me, often I feel He was disappointed in me. I have long that was my biases, insecurities, and self worth issues coming out. I have come to seriously wonder if maybe God was quite disappointed in me and the reason for the silence, or just lack of disappointment is that maybe He isn’t anymore.

My evangelical friends don’t really get what I see. It actually upsets many of them when I tell them what I am seeing. I was talking to one friend about the fact that there are 600 known prostitutes in the city (of course they move from city to city to city) and he was totally freaked out. Our conversation ended with, “I am glad our church isn’t on the west side, I couldn’t deal with this". Yet I talk with some of them all of the time. They are working tonight two blocks down from where I am writing this. Addicted to drugs, sexual abuse survivors, acquired brain injuries. They aren’t abstract numbers but real girls with real stories and real families but the church ignores it. They also ignore the fact that many of their congregants are the ones that are paying these girls to get them off. While my faith seems as strong as always, I am no longer interested in a religion that is disconnected from the community it is a part of.

I know there are reasons for that, Lyle Schaller will tell us that the idea of the neighborhood church died with the rise of the car and cheap fuel but at the same time when I hear that people are living in over crowded slum suites because of sky high rents, there are 600 known prostitutes in the city and the vast majority of them are being trafficked, gangs are taking an toll on our kids, and some local elementary schools have had to cut back to 30 minute lunch breaks to stop elementary school girls from working the street on lunch breaks… doesn’t this call people to do something other than giving away some free clothes and serve soup once in a while? If young grade seven and eight girls losing their virginity to STD carrying john’s doesn’t call us to drastic action, what will?

Over fifteen years ago, columnist Paul Jackson wrote in The Star Phoenix that the church had abandoned it’s role of social services provider – taking care of widows and orphans – to the government during the 1960s and 70s. As the economies in North America struggled to pay for their new obligations, Jackson felt the church needed to step up again. It hasn’t happened yet. In fact most trends show churches walking more and more away from those difficult tasks and instead continuing to move to younger and younger suburban neighborhoods and therefore away from the problems. It may be great church growth doctrine but what about the neighborhood and that you left behind. The east side of Saskatoon has twice as many churches per person than then west side does. Guess which side of the city has the higher concentration of wealth and guess which side has the core neighborhoods in it. I’ll let you figure it out.

A look back

May 26th, 2010

by Jordon Cooper.

2 comments

My early ideas on Social Services were shaped by the Devine Tories. As some of you know, the first campaign I worked on was the 1986 provincial election campaign that saw Grant Devine and the Progressive Conservatives re-elected. Devine was confronted with a large budget deficit, an extremely effective NDP opposition party, an ongoing drought and low grain prices, declining poll numbers, as well as his own conservative ideology. With the NDP controlling Regina and most of Saskatoon, the 1986 election split the province between urban and rural voters and Social Services became a wedge issue that was supposed to motivate Tories across the land.

Saskatchewan made some big cuts to Social Services and as Janice MacKinnon later discovered and wrote about, made Social Services into a very politicized department. I think history will see Grant Devine as a good man who believed in Saskatchewan but was a horrible judge of character in those he appointed. MacKinnon agreed

In appointing the hyper partisan Grant Schmidt to be Minister of Social Services in his second term, the Progressive Conservatives made no effort in hiding their dislike of the “socialist” Ministry of Social Services. The Conservatives had a weekly (or monthly… it was long time ago) fundraiser called Tory Tuesdays where a cabinet minister would come to Saskatoon and speak to the (dwindling) party faithful. I remember listening to Deputy Premier Pat Smith and then Social Services minister Grant Schmidt rail against people on Social Services and the Ministry itself. Janice MacKinnon quotes him in her book as saying the Ministry of Social Services spent money like a drunken sailor and said that out of “2,200 employees in the department, 1,500 were his political enemies”. I don’t think it was a stretch to say that the Tories saw Social Services as a ministry that served an urban NDP core constituency where the Tories saw no chance for growth. By attacking them, they also appealed to their base.

Later I was at a fundraiser for newly appointed Social Services Minister Bill Neudorf. He joked about while he was excited to be in cabinet, how Social Services was the worst ministry in the province to have to take over in his public comments but at least he was in cabinet.

I never thought too much about it from a philosophical point of view. Like a lot of you, I believed that Social Services should be for those that really needed the funding and was (and am) disgusted by those who are taking advantage of the system. Our neighbour growing up was a masterful user of the system and despite being on Social Services had a much higher standard of living then we did. The fact that she was brazen about her fraud made it a lot worse to take. At the same time, I had no idea how hard it was on Social Services for those who are unwilling or unable to scam the system and to be honest, I had no reason to look into it. Growing up in Lawson Heights, crime wasn’t really on anyone’s radar. I used to walk our dog Misty along Spadina Crescent late at night through River Heights. It was before there was street lights along the river and it was pitch dark. Not only did I feel no fear along the walk, neither did any of the people we met. Actually most of them carried dog treats with them (which is really odd considering who goes out with dog treats on the off chance they meet a pleasant dog while walking along a darkened part of the Meewasin Trail?). In addition to spoiling my dog, they had no apprehension about chatting with a large college student they met. Crime and personal safety wasn’t on any of our minds.

As far as homelessness went, my first apartment was a downtown apartment for $250/month. I am not sure was Social Services was allowing back then but you could find $350/month apartments all over downtown. When I look back at old documents for the Salvation Army from the 90s, the issue was not too many guys in the dorms at work but there was concerns about too few men in the facility.

When I started to work in the church, social issues were not high on my theological agenda. The Free Methodist Church has never really engaged in social justice issues in North America, the church I had attended growing up was on the edge of McNabb Park but yet struggled to engage it consistently (although flooding it’s parking lot one winter for a skating rink was a cool idea). While we touched on issues of poverty in ethics classes in college, it was never a local issue. Evangelical theology is inherently individualistic and that crossed the line to me to how I saw the world (as many of you have told me over the years, I have libertarian leanings).

The first I was really challenged in this area was by Methodist theologian, Leonard Sweet in his book, A Cup of Coffee at the Soul Cafe when it talked about what it meant for kids to go school hungry. The amount he quoted in the book was quite a bit less than I had blown at McDonald’s on my way home from work that night and for the first time, issues of poverty started to make some sense to me. While I still saw it as an individual generosity issue, I started to question it a lot more, even though I wasn’t seeing as a societal issue.

During this time Wendy and I bought our home in Mayfair. Mayfair was and is a core neighbourhood but like most home owners, I only saw what was happening in our neighbourhood in terms of housing values, not what was going on in the homes that call Mayfair home but even then as I saw a drug dealer selling drugs right on my street corner (the same corner my house is located on), something was going on and it wasn’t all good.

A couple of years later I was in Fullerton, lecturing at Hope International University. I was flying out of LAX on a Sunday morning and after being trapped in Los Angeles traffic many times over the week, I left really, really early on a Sunday morning without realizing soon that I was the only one on Interstate 5. I got to the LAX area really early and decided that I had some time to tour Watts. It was the first time that I started to see neighbourhoods as societal narratives and my first thought was “What the hell is going on here?”. How does one of the richest cities in the world allow Watts to happen and Watts isn’t even the worst part of Los Angeles. I came home and started to read about Watts, Skid Row, East Hastings, and other urban areas gone wrong and started to really wonder what was happening, both in Los Angeles and in other large urban settings. The more I realized that Saskatoon was no longer isolated from that. Poverty, crime, violence, and life in Saskatoon were a series of interconnected issues that were becoming interconnected with my life.

Around this time I had read Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book, The Ingenuity Gap at my friend’s Karen’s insistence. While his story is a global one, Homer-Dixon tells a story of interconnected and complex systems that are evolving in a global world. While Thomas Friedman tells the economic version, Thomas Homer-Dixon adds environmental and complex socio-political factors to the equation. Each one of these factors require their own specialized experts and the problem is that as the world becomes more connected, the variables overwhelm even the experts which is kind of what is happening in many cities right now. So a new Super Wal-Mart comes to Saskatoon and increases the number of jobs by 100. That’s a good thing right? Well what about job losses and hour cutbacks at Confederation Mall because the anchor store isn’t there? Well not so good right? On the other hand there are people who are shopping locally because they can’t get to Wal-Mart on bus. That’s good for local store owners, except now the consumers have less discretionary income.

As I later took a job at the Salvation Army Community Services in Saskatoon, I saw a complex series of factors manifesting in some pretty horrific behavior. On my first shift I saw some very young prostitutes shooting themselves up after a night of working on the street, the next day I saw my first dial-a-dope transaction at a nearby flophouse. A week later as I was walking home, a women started to hit me with a stick on the street as I was “her enemy”. I was quite happy to see a beat cop as she started to hit him and I kept walking. I started to question what I was seeing like almost every staff I have later hired. What causes this behaviour, how do you change it, why can’t more be done? Yet at the end of the day, I felt like I was working inside The Ingenuity Gap as the contributing interrelated factors overwhelm my (and others) ability to understand them.

As I am writing this, I am up at the lake and last night Wendy and I had coffee at our friends the Rigby’s. John is on the board here and was talking about the decision to shut down Kinney Memorial Lodge for the winter and whether or not that was a good one. Without giving a conclusion he mentioned a bunch of factors to consider and it made me chuckle because here you have a pretty simple question, did it make sense to close a retreat centre down when business is slowest (and probably expenses are higher) and even that has all of these variables and factors affecting the decision. How much more complicated is what is happening to Riversdale, Pleasant, and Mayfair?

Over the next several weeks I am going to try to look at some of these factors in Saskatoon. I needed a framework to work through this so I am going to use the programs where I work as a starting point to start the discussion and branch off from there. I welcome your comments and if you don’t want to say anything publically, feel free to e-mail me as I don’t publish any e-mails publically here.

The Decline of Mayfair?

Mar 8th, 2010

by Jordon Cooper.

No comments yet

Wendy has a post on the supposed decline of Mayfair and talks about the violence and crime that is happening in the neighborhood and puts it into some context.

Prostitution in Mayfair

Sep 21st, 2009

by Jordon Cooper.

Comments are off for this post

The Star Phoenix has an article on the increase of street prostitution in my neighborhood.

Ground zero for the sex-trade workers is hard to pinpoint, but the new stroll is anchored by 33rd Street West, stretching by some estimates to 38th Street, between Idylwyld Drive and Avenue G North.

"(It) turns into a different place after 10:30 at night," said Sharon Loeppky, who organizes a citizens’ patrol for the Hudson Bay Park/Mayfair community association.

"We’re not confrontational. We just walk. We try and make the johns uncomfortable. Those girls, I don’t believe they’ve chosen this life."

The migration of prostitutes from the 20th Street West area may have happened for a couple of reasons, said Hill, such as the closure of the notorious Barry Hotel and the prevalence of massage parlors in the 33rd Street West area.

I hold the city responsible for this as Mayfair is home to many of the city’s ~~brothels~~ massage parlors. While there is a difference in what happens behind closed doors and street prostitution, for those of us who live in close proximity to one ~~brothels~~ massage parlor (it’s half a block down the street), the high speed traffic out of there is incredible and someone is going to die there if something isn’t done. We live in a neighborhood where young kids run the streets 24/7 during the summer and weekends and now we have traffic approaching 100 km. zooming down Avenue D North.

It’s a blue collar working class neighborhood. It doesn’t deserve to be “ground zero” for prostitutes and ~~brothels~~ massage parlors. Wendy doesn’t need to be harassed coming home from work at Safeway by johns and neither does anyone else.

My other issue with this article was this statement by the Saskatoon Police Service.

Until the town hall meeting with 45 residents, police weren’t aware of the increased activity, said Engele.

I have e-mailed, talked to individual cops and called the police and invited them to park beside my house for a night to see what goes on a couple of blocks off 33rd street. Apparently they need more invites but what more do I have to do? It’s frustrating for everyone but with the other sex trade shops in our neighborhood and on my block, doesn’t that become an invitation for street prostitution and drugs?

Domestic Assault

Jan 17th, 2009

by Jordon.

Comments are off for this post

As I was coming home last night, I noticed numerous police cars a couple blocks over and there was police tape everywhere around the church a block north in the ~~1500 block~~ 1700 block of Avenue D. Apparently a six year old girl was found with life threatening injuries and was shot during a domestic assault in the room next to her. They apprehended two suspects later on in the morning and are looking for a third.

I was shocked to hear this. Having grown up in Saskatoon since 1984, there has been lot’s of knife incidents but you rarely hear of a gun incident. Considering our block and the neighborhood has grown a lot quieter, it’s a shock when you hear of this just a couple houses down from you.