A traffic cop pulled over a pickup truck clocked at nearly 150 kilometres per hour in a 100 zone. The lone male in the pickup was travelling on Highway 16 near Reeder Road on the eastern outskirts of Vanderhoof. It was just before 9:30 Saturday morning.
When the Mountie walked up to the vehicle, it became quickly apparent that a search of the vehicle was in order.
"You guys can all smell this stuff here. Imagine what it was like in a confined vehicle," said Insp. Eric Brewer, commander of northern B.C.'s traffic police, in a room so thick with the smell of marijuana it stung the eyes and coated the throat. "This has interrupted someone's business."
The name of the suspect will not be released until charges are formally sworn. The suspect is a 52-year-old male resident of the Vanderhoof area.
"A search of both him and the pickup truck revealed two large garbage bags containing 30 separate smaller bags of what was believed to be marijuana," Cpl. Madonna Saunderson explained. "In total, eight kilograms of what we believe is marijuana - with an estimated street value of $45,000 - was seized."
Several hundred dollars cash was also seized, and the 2010 "dually" four-by-four pickup was impounded for seven days due to the excessive speeding.
One of the region's senior traffic members, RCMP Staff Sgt. Pat McTiernan, said this bust is becoming typical for the traffic cops on the highways across the greater Central Interior region and the North District as a whole.
"We encourage our members to look beyond the ticket, when they pull someone over for traffic violations," said McTiernan. "In my day, there were guys who would come back at the end of the shift with 30 or 35 tickets. That is great, but that's all. Everybody was happy with those numbers, but that isn't what we encourage anymore. We have progressed a lot. Now we train our members to watch the behaviour of the people in the vehicle, the signs they see in the vehicle, and how to ask a lot more questions. Is that TV in the back seat stolen? What is that smell? Are there any sounds that catch your attention? Things like that. We know that stolen stuff and drugs and people with outstanding warrants are being moved around the area somehow. Our people have been mindful of that, putting that training into action, and the results have been great."
Also being recognized - with training and new technology like audio/video recording in all traffic cars, and communications support from dispatch - is the dangerous position traffic police are always in when they pull a vehicle over for often mundane things.
"It is probably the most dangerous situation a police officer can encounter: the routine traffic stop," said Brewer. "You are trained to be vigilant. You don't just saunter up. You know why you pulled the vehicle over, but you have no idea what the motivations are of the people in the vehicle. It is the complete unknown."
It was a traffic cop, Oklahoma State Trooper Charlie Hanger, who spotted a vehicle with no license plate and pulled over the driver, Timothy McVeigh, about 90 minutes after McVeigh had blown up 16 city blocks in Oklahoma City in an act of domestic terrorism, killing 168 people. Thursday is the 17th anniversary of that blast.
It was a traffic cop who, on another Vanderhoof-area road, pulled over Cody Alan Legebokoff in November, 2010. From that routine roadside encounter came the accusations now proceeding through court on four counts of murder against Legebokoff.
"We are all over the place, and that is a big part of our mandate, to support the efforts of the region's detachments, to do police work over and above what the compliment of general duty members are doing in the communities around our region," Brewer said.
