"What happens on the Blue Mile, Might just land you a trial"
Friday, June 02, 2006

Posted by Kerrzy

If you’ve been involved in any post-Oiler game crimes on the city’s famed Whyte Avenue, you might want to take a look at this. In an attempt to slow down the rowdy post-game destruction expected to hit the streets of Edmonton during the Oilers first trip to the Stanley Cup finals in sixteen years, Edmonton’s police service has started posting still images of people caught committing crimes from videotapes of the ‘celebrations,’ and they hope that city residents will help them identify the “hooligans and vandals” in the pictures... According to the EPS website, the police have received twenty-five tips and one person has turned themselves in just one day after the pictures were originally posted, a statistic that will likely be helped along by the front page of Thursday’s Edmonton Sun, which displays the pictures along with the headline “Whyte Avenues Most Wanted” across the entire page.

The police made it’s message clear in a May 31st press release that “What goes on on Whyte Ave does not stay on Whyte Ave,” as they take a harder stance towards avenue hooligans.

“[Posting the pictures] is a similar strategy to that implemented following Canada Day 2001,” the press release stated, in reference to the July 1st, 2001 riots on Whyte Avenue in ‘celebration’ of our patriotism, reminding and warning party-hard patrons that “all those charged at that time were sentenced to time in jail.”

Moral of the Story: Friends don’t let friends smash windows and light bonfires in the middle of a closed off street in celebration of the home team scoring a big win.