Sitting in a coffeeshop

It was a hot day yesterday in downtown Calgary. It ended with a massive thunder and hail storm that shut down the city. But in the afternoon it was a hot summer day in the swelter of Seventh Avenue.
The police were out in force patrolling the street. Five of them conferred on the corner of Seventh and Centre. They busted an old man on a bicycle. That’s important. We’ll get back to old men on bicycles peddling downtown. Then they busted a couple of girls, each in their twenties. They searched them, let one go and ticketed the other. Then they split up.
A couple of the cops came into the coffee shop. They were very hot and sweating. The tall blonde one took off his hat at the counter and you could tell he was suffering from the heat. He got his coffee; it looked like a latte, and came over to the table next to me and sat down, waiting for his partner.
“You look a little hot,” I said to him.
He chuckled. He had a good clean kind of smile, one that took up most of his face.
“Yeah,” he replied.
“It must be rough in those black uniforms. Maybe they should put you guys in shorts,” I said.
“Hah, I don’t think that’ll happen, but it’s a good idea,” he said.
“How long have you been doing the downtown beat?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve been on the beat for about five years now,” he said. “I’ve been doing downtown for around a year now.”
“It must have been tough last winter,” I said. “There looked like a lot of people on the street in the cold. Some of them didn’t make it.”
The smile left his face. “It was hard,” he said, “You see, when it comes to the homeless, we deal with three different groups of people. We deal with those with mental problems (he shrugged) and we can’t do anything for them. We deal with the working poor and we deal with those who have severe addictions.
“The working poor aren’t that much of a problem,” he continued, “I mean; you’re not gong to find one of them in a doorway smoking crack.
“But the addicts … what Calgarians don’t know,” he said, stabbing the air with his finger for emphasis, “is that their habit costs $200 a day. They have to get that money. They break into cars. They break into people’s homes. They’ll do anything to get that money.”
He took a sip on his coffee. He made sense. He made perfect sense. Social scientists say the homeless are all mentally ill. Others say people are homeless because of a lack of affordable housing. But here we have a cop on the beat for a year, who brings a lot of light to a dark and confused issue.
He says there are three groups. We don’t know how many are in each group mind you, but at least we have clear lines of demarcation. There are those with mental problems, who we ignore; those who work hard, but are poor; and the addicts, who we keep busting.
So, for the working poor, there is obviously no affordable housing. Those with mental problems, there is no hope, and for the druggies, they’re on the street from a very bad choice made some time ago.
The cop put down his mug and was joined by his partner. They talked shop for a bit.
During a lull, I asked, “Do you think someone would be mentally ill after sucking on a crack pipe for a couple of years?”
The same cop thought a moment, “I don’t know,” he said, “Most of them are pretty lucid. They’re pretty intelligent. They’re smart. The way they talk, they don’t seem mentally ill, but I don’t know …
“The military uses sleep deprivation to torture people,” he went on, “Lack of sleep is a form of torture. These guys go on a binge for two or three days and you can tell it really takes it out of them physically.”
He flashed another one of his smiles. It seemed to be hiding a world of experiences.
The two got up and put on their hats once again. Coffee break’s over, back to work. We said goodbye.