Mark Horsley had been a police officer for 30 years when he accepted the strangest assignment of his career.
In 2015, Vancouver was seeing a string of attacks and robberies targeting people in wheelchairs: between January 2014 and June 2015, 28 violent incidents had been reported, and more than half took place in the Downtown Eastside. So Horsley climbed into a motorized wheelchair, said he had a brain injury, and set out to tour the neighborhood with a fanny pack in plain sight and some cash, hoping someone would try to take advantage of him.
No one did. A young man zipped up his fanny pack and warned him to be careful. People who asked him for change gave him back the exact amount. One man asked permission to pray for his healing, and another told him how hard it was to care for his own mother, who used a wheelchair. Someone even gave him money despite having little himself.
After five days there had not been a single arrest, but Horsley returned having had more than 300 encounters and with about 24 dollars more than he had when he started. “This community has a soul”, he said.