The surveillance video is horrifying.
A gunman running up a driveway at night, firing at two SUVs with an automatic weapon.
The flashes from the muzzle, the staccato of gunfire, are familiar from countless war and gangster movies. But these are not special effects and this is not a movie.
This is a quiet neighbourhood in sleepy residential White Rock in the early morning hours of Feb. 22. Rounds fired in a sustained barrage of shooting are all too real – as shown by the bullet holes that pockmark parked cars along the street.
Four men, presumed targets of the attack, sustained serious injuries. Miraculously, bullets didn’t penetrate the walls of nearby houses and kill a sleeping child, or hit someone out walking their dog.
If this is the new reality of our city by the sea, you wouldn’t know it from the next White Rock council meeting, only days later.
For the stewards of our city, it was business as usual – including discussion of resident encroachments on city boulevards, and commendable results for the weekend’s Coldest Night of the Year fundraiser. But not a word about an incident that came within a hairbreadth of being one of the worst tragedies in the city’s history.
Where was the press conference by the mayor and the RCMP detachment commander to decry such violence on the streets of White Rock, and to assure worried residents that everything possible was being done to find the perpetrators?
Such words may not accomplish tangible progress, but they do need to be said. It is part of the responsibility of leadership, a reassuring demonstration that those in office care about those who put them there. The ‘nothing to see here, folks’ approach is an abdication of that responsibility.
Gunfire on our quiet streets was a wake-up call for many in White Rock – but it seems the current administration has yet to receive the message.