A driver plowed a car into a crowd at a street festival celebrating Filipino heritage in Vancouver on Saturday night, killing at least nine people and injuring others.
Some of those attending the festival helped arrest the suspect at the scene, who police identified as a 30-year-old man.
…
“It’s something you don’t expect to see in your lifetime,” Kris Pangilinan, a Toronto-based journalist, told Canadian public broadcaster CBC. “[The driver] just slammed the pedal down and rammed into hundreds of people. It was like seeing a bowling ball hit — all the bowling pins and all the pins flying up in the air.”
He continued, “It was like a war zone… There were bodies all over the ground.”
No motive has been given, although police have said they are “confident” it was not an act of terrorism.
I wonder what makes them confident of that. It certainly resembles a terrorist attack.
He wasn’t. I’m not going to post his name or race here, but he has been charged and his name made public.
It does resemble a terrorist attack…
But if you watched the press conference with the chief of police (or the equivalent title)…
They have the suspect in custody, there were no specific threats to the event before hand, the suspect has a long history of mental illness, and the suspect has had many previous run ins with the police, ‘suspect is well known to the department’… gives me the impression this is a person who is having one kind of mental breakdown or another … every month or other week.
At one point a reporter asked if it was terrorism and the CoP basically says… that would require a political or ideological motivation.
The CoP … you could tell he was doing his best to divulge information he could without divulging information he couldn’t. He paused and tried to rephrase things a few times, openly struggled with … seemingly genuinely being unclear about what he was legally allowed to say.
If the person truly is seriously mentally ill, there may be additional laws in place protecting some extra level of their privacy, at least before charges are actually brought.
Put all that together, and it seems like this person has been just… very very seriously mentally ill for a long time, as in, too mentally ill to be capable of forming a coherent or describable ideology.
Or, at the very least, that seems to me to be what the police are saying.
Dude might have been drunk. If it isn’t intentional, it’s usually a case of too drunk or too old.
There’s a very specific rubric for what counts as a terrorist attack in Canada. Probably the level of calculation and premeditation involved was a factor and that he’s not a part of an ideologically organized group that is trying to influence behaviour of a government or political body.
A spontaneous hate crime made against a population is technically not a terrorist attack by Canadian definition. To count you have to have done it for a narrow slice of very specific reasons.
I know it’s a slim chance and I’m going out on a limb here, but something tells me the driver was a white conservative.
Video shows the person looks Asian. Probably conservative. I’d imagine a lot of Filipinos voted for Trump too.
EDIT: Filipinos. Not Filipino Canadians.
Going out on a limb that most of the Filipinos in that crowd didn’t vote for Trump, being that it happened in Canada
I’d imagine a lot of Filipinos voted for Trump too.
Doubtful in Vancouver.
Seems like people already believe Canada is a US state. I dunno if I should laugh at the stupidity or cry that stupidity is winning
You misunderstand. And you’re not a very nice person. What I’m suggesting is that Filipinos have the same beliefs across the border. ChatGPT doesn’t seem to believe that’s the case tho.
No motive has been given, although police have said they are “confident” it was not an act of terrorism.
Let me guess? The suspect is white! I jest, but at this point it’s probably likely the driver is a radicalized “conservative” than any other group.
No. East Asian looking male with a history of mental illness.
Most likely the political component of this tragedy is how the Socreds closed regional mental health institutions in the late 20th C, and subsequent governments just swept the whole thing under the rug while homelessness spread through the province and mentally disturbed and unsupported people lashed out in random ways.
Now you have dorks and bootlickers like Mayor Sims turning a health system failure into an opportunity for cruelty and repression. Punishment will be the talking point. They will roll with that, watch.
Why would you guess? You can literally just look it up. It’s all over the news.
Cars are a terrorist threat! We should remove them from our streets.
Actually, I agree. Put them underground, in a tunnel, where people aren’t walking.
Walking > Bikes > Trains > Buses > fuck cars.
Don’t put them in the city at all, even in a tunnel. If you’re going into the city, park and take transit. (Edit: my complaint here is personal; Boston had an interstate running through it, which they buried, and then put a four-to-six-lane road on top of it where there was supposed to be green space.)
Yeah, I know some people can’t do that because they’re working and need tools, e.g. plumbers, but if we get all the casual drivers on transit it’s good enough.
Can mods do something about this thread? Everyone is engaging in friendly speculation that it was terrorism, because their lizard brains are remembering the Toronto attack. This was a mental health problem. The suspect was not a white supremacist. Go back to America please.
In this case I have too little insight. But it’s quite clear how biased these reports are in Germany. Anyone not absolutely German is immediately a terrorist and every white, German dude is a confused loner. Media never suspects that mental issues based on trauma from war and refugee journeys might be a good reason or that guys voting for right wing extremists and killing “woke” people might have anything to do with their political views.
Well there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest this was a mental health issue.
The thing is before evidence comes up we see the issue with reporting:
- if black it is gang activity until proven otherwise
- if brown it is terrorism until proven otherwise
- if white it is mental health until proven otherwise
