West Vancouver police are urging people to keep their cool and their comments civil after a local business owner was targeted with what were described as racial insults twice in one day.
Const. Kevin Goodmurphy, spokesman for the West Vancouver Police Department, said police were called twice on Sunday afternoon to a business in Horseshoe Bay to reports of two different men yelling at the owners.
In the first incident, which happened around 5:30 p.m., the man reportedly began screaming at the business owners and “did make a derogatory racial slur” aimed at people of Asian descent, said Goodmurphy.
The man had left the business when police arrived, but police caught up with the 42-year-old of no fixed address elsewhere in the Horseshoe Bay area.
Police warned the man – who Goodmurphy described as still quite agitated – about his behaviour.
Police were called back less than two hours later – this time by a bystander – who reported that a second man had also been seen yelling at the same business owners.
Goodmurphy said it wasn’t clear exactly who had said what in that incident, but the exchange was still upsetting to the owners.
“It’s upsetting behaviour,” he said. “Especially for a merchant who is already sensitive to the current climate.”
Goodmurphy said the approximately 50-year-old man involved in the second incident wasn’t from West Vancouver and appeared to be drunk.
“The level of intoxication likely had something to do with this person’s behaviour,” he added.
The incident comes amid concerns that incidents of COVID-19-related racist harassment are on the rise in the Lower Mainland, which have included several verbal and physical attacks.
It also comes as North Vancouver MLA Bowinn Ma recently responded to a social media post by famed North Vancouver rocker Bryan Adams bemoaning the cancellation of his current tour "thanks to some [expletive] bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards."
In her response, Ma said everyone needs to “recognize that we are imperfect as human beings, and so we need to check ourselves to make sure that our internal biases aren’t negatively impacting the way that we think of or treat other people, and to make sure that we don’t go around behaving like assholes to other human beings all the time.”
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