Many Oilers fans don’t want to talk about Game 1 in the Oilers-Canucks playoff series, but remember that time Vancouver rioted in 2011? Now to foreshadow what may happen, but here’s why it did.
Edmonton has had its share of hockey-related mayhem as well. Whyte Avenue saw destruction, public drunkenness, and injuries during the Oilers 2006 Stanley Cup run.
Former EPS officer and criminologist Dan Jones was working in the middle of it.
“At the beginning of the 2006 Stanley Cup, our direction from the leadership was to let them have Whyte Ave., give them a certain amount of space, and not really enforce anything. What happened was the more you would let them the more they would take. And then we tightened up and had a police officer literally almost every ten feet,” explained Jones.
While mob mentality is nothing new, not surprisingly Jones says destruction on Whyte Ave. in 2006 was scaled down as uniformed police presence was beefed up.
While alcohol is most certainly a factor, there’s no telling why Edmonton smashed things after a happy win, as opposed to Vancouver fans burning the city down after their Stanley Cup loss in 2011.
“You have your normal everyday people who go to work everyday who decide to smash windows on stores,” said Jones.
There hasn’t been any mass fan destruction on Whyte Ave since ’06. That’s probably in part because of the decade of darkness as the Oilers continued to lose — but Jones says the difference now — is that fans have a public space to gather in the Ice District.
“The way they have it contained in an area where you can’t really wreck anything in that area, they have the TVs up. It seems they’ve made it a more appropriate way to enjoy the game in an outside venue.”
Edmonton has seen one other riot that wasn’t hockey-related, that was the Canada Day riot of 2001.
