Good Night Out team members are identifiable by their matching pink high visibility vests and pink backpacks.

Image Credit: Michelle Gamage, Local Journalism Initiative

It’s quarter to midnight and the Good Night Out team are arriving bundled up and bright eyed, ready for their four-hour shift to start.

They chit chat as they restock their matching pink backpacks from a set of lockers located in the lobby of the Howard Johnson hotel, an SRO near the foot of Vancouver’s Granville bridge. In go granola bars, tissues, flip flops, water bottles, band-aids, pink doggy bags (useful for vomit), condoms, baby wipes, candy and naloxone kits.

“We pack anything that we think people could need on any given night out there,” says Katie Tough, outreach program director for the organization.

She’s gesturing at the Granville Strip, a four-block stretch of downtown Vancouver that packs in dozens of bars, nightclubs, concert venues and late-night eateries. For the region’s young and ready-to-party, it’s considered the de-facto entertainment district. On any night of the week, hundreds to thousands of people will drink heavily, do drugs and generally just let their hair down.

This is where Good Night Out comes in. They’re a non-profit dedicated to reducing gender-based violence, focusing on employees and patrons of the entertainment and hospitality industries. They host consent workshops for venues, non-profits and universities and have a dedicated street team that spends every Friday and Saturday night, from midnight until 4 a.m., walking the strip and helping out where they can.

In January the team received federal funding through Women and Gender Equality Canada which it is using to bring similar street teams to Victoria and Nelson, Tough says.

To get a better idea of what this solutions approach looks like on the ground, The Tyee tagged along with the team for a chilly but dry night in early March.

During that time the team helped respond to an apparent incident of two young women being drugged, checked in on half a dozen people vomiting because they drank too much alcohol, and intervened in a drunken dispute. They also received hugs, turned down several offers of cash donations and accepted one gift of a spritz of perfume from a late-night reveller who wanted to thank them for what they do.

Midnight

The shift starts as the team of four don their pink high visibility vests and matching pink backpacks and check in with one another. Who is tired? Who feels the most chipper? Who wants to be the lead first aid attendant? Who could be the night’s police liaison?

After the roles are assigned, they head out into the frigid night. There’s snow in the forecast.

Tough says cold weather and rain act as “natural” harm reduction pressures because bad weather keeps people home. The Granville Strip is “quiet” for a Friday night, she adds, though there are easily dozens of people milling about.

Young women tend to suffer the most for fashion, wearing short skirts and spindly heels. Men wear more sensible sneakers, but they’ve similarly forgone jackets and walk with their arms close to their sides for warmth.

The team soon comes across an incident unfolding in front of the nightclub Twelve West. Two women are losing consciousness, and their friends are panicking. They were celebrating a birthday, and a stranger bought them rounds of shots. Very suddenly, two of the women weren’t able to stand up or keep their eyes open.

It doesn’t appear to be an overdose because the women are breathing and can flutter their eyes when addressed loudly. But they’re vomiting and one woman is lying on the cement. A female bystander is crouching over her, using her jacket to cover where the unconscious woman’s skirt is riding up.

Things move quickly then. The Good Night Out team checks in with the women and her panicked friends. Firefighters arrive, and then paramedics, who get the unconscious women loaded into the ambulance and take them to the hospital. A handful of police officers who are stationed on nearly every block of the Granville Strip on weekend nights help with crowd control.

Firefighter medical kit

Image Credit: Michelle Gamage, Local Journalism Initiative

Tough sighs. This isn’t uncommon to see outside of clubs like Twelve West, she says. While this appears to be an incident of the women’s drinks getting drugged with GHB or benzodiazepines, it’s also common to see people drink until they vomit or lose consciousness — even though bar staff are supposed to stop serving people alcohol long before they get to that level of intoxication.

As emergency crews clear out — taking care to disinfect their boots after stepping in puke — the Good Night Out team stays behind, talking with the women’s panicked friends. They assure them this wasn’t their fault and that their friends are going to be OK, and help get them a taxi to the hospital to ride out the rest of the night at their friends’ bedside.

Educating bar staff

When Good Night Out was founded in 2017, there weren’t a lot of workshops that covered how to navigate drinking or patrons flirting with staff on the job, says Stacey Forrester, education director and co-founder for the organization.

In fact, there was resistance from workplaces to bring in gender-based violence workshops because management was worried it signalled there was a problem, Forrester says. She’s worked hard to change that perception so businesses can be proactive rather than reactive.

In the early days they hosted around 14 workshops per year, all designed to help reduce gender-based violence for customers and staff. Then the #MeToo movement hit, followed by the pandemic, where everyone moved online. Their workshops ballooned to 87 per year — with numbers still rising, she says.

Still, Tough says not many businesses on the Granville Strip have taken their workshop. While she can’t be sure of the reason, she suspects it’s because the businesses don’t think they need it.

But, she says, the workshop is designed around practical and approachable ways to tackle gender-based violence, and it could likely improve any workplace.

“We cater to cisgender men who have likely never sat through a workshop like this before,” Forrester says, though she adds all genders can learn something from the workshop. They’re designed to be “accessible for all levels of knowledge” and don’t lay blame, instead focusing on solutions.

Solutions like offering low-alcohol drinks if someone seems hesitant but isn’t asking for non-alcoholic beverages, she says. Or getting bussers, who walk laps around venues clearing away glasses, to monitor patron’s intoxication levels and reporting any sudden changes to bar staff. Or checking in with a customer and asking if they consent to having a stranger buy them a drink.

Managers can help by changing dress codes from those that require heels, skirts and other revealing clothing, and by asking new employees about any potential trauma they have and what the workplace could do to make them feel safer.

Workplaces can also train staff in the “six Ds” of intervention. There’s detect, where you keep an eye out for people who are being made uncomfortable or possible perpetrators who may escalate their tactics throughout the night. There’s direct, where you have different strategies to deal with different types of aggressors. There’s delegate, which assigns staff to respond to certain situations, and de-escalate, which works to pull a person out of a situation to check in on them. Distract helps shift the focus of a situation and delay means responding to a situation even after it happened, like checking in with a co-worker at the end of their shift. Finally there’s documenting interactions and debriefing.

2:26 a.m.

Back on the Granville Strip, the team is doing an alley sweep. People sometimes go into back alleys to vomit and then can pass out or be sexually assaulted, Tough says.

Tonight there’s a man leaning against a wall to retch. When the team approach him he gets defensive, saying it’s just his “weak-ass stomach” and not the alcohol that’s making him nauseous.

The team de-escalates, complementing his shiny jacket and mentioning how they were handing out water bottles to a group they just passed — would he want one too?

Good Night Out alley sweep

Image Credit: Michelle Gamage, Local Journalism Initiative

He accepts, and while they rummage around in their backpacks they happen to pull out a granola bar and pack of gum too. They share the snacks and soon he’s swapping stories with the team, laughing and at ease.

Tough says the majority of Good Night Out’s interactions are with young men who have had too much to drink. Women tend to stick together and help one another get home safely, where men can have more of a “keep up or go home” attitude, she says.

The team moves on, walking past a small crowd of 15 people who have gathered to listen to freestyle rapping.

“There’s the folks who are saving lives, yeah we see you down here in pink almost every night,” raps a guy, waving at the team as they go past.

The team walks a loop, pacing up and down the four-block stretch and dipping into secluded alleys and alcoves as they go. Tough’s watch buzzes, notifying her she’s walked 10,000 steps that day.

A team member pauses, noticing an older couple who appear to be bickering. The man grabs the woman’s arm and she yanks it away. The team decides to see if they know one another.

When the team checks in, the man immediately gets aggressive, slurring his words as he tells them to get lost. The woman says the man is her drunk boyfriend.

The man keeps stepping closer to team members, raising his voice and getting in their personal space. All at once they turn around and exit the situation.

Tough says Good Night Out doesn’t get involved in fights and, if there is one happening or likely to be one happening soon, they might remind people about the neighbourhood’s police presence. Team members should never put themselves at risk.

3:13 a.m.

It’s time for a break so we head to Breka Bakery and Café on Davie Street, which is open 24 hours and doing brisk business. The team orders sandwiches and pastries and everyone wraps their hands around a hot tea or coffee.

In the brightly lit café the stress from the last interaction fades away and soon the team is happily chatting and teasing me for looking tired.

When we hit the strip again, the streets are busier. Last call has passed and all the venues have finally closed their doors, pushing bleary-eyed patrons out onto the street.

The team hands out water bottles, granola bars and the occasional pink puke bag.

We meet half a dozen groups of friends who are loyally standing by while the drunkest member loses their lunch. These friends tease one another and offer tender back pats while taking care to keep their shoes free of their friend’s cookies.

Tough says it’s important to also keep an eye out for couples where one member is stumbling and the other seems sturdy. There are people — mostly men — who live in the area who will walk around at the end of the night and pick up heavily intoxicated women, she says.

Checking in can be as easy as asking if the couple knows one another, or how long they’ve been together, she says.

But tonight it seems like the night is winding down. The streets have cleared out as people head home.

Even those who sleep on this street have snuggled down under blankets, or are sitting stoically and smoking as the street clears.

3:54 a.m.

The team is calling it a night, hanging their pink high visibility vests and matching backpacks in their lockers. Some nights it’s just as you’re heading home that something big happens, I’m told. But not tonight.

On the now nearly empty strip, neon signs and streetlights brightly illuminate the takeout food containers, beer bottles and pools of puke left behind by the partygoers.

City cleanup crews will arrive as the sun does, sweeping and power washing and scrubbing. They do good work, but there’s a permanent grunge that remains, a buildup of gum stuck to the sidewalk and cigarette butts cluttering doorways.

The Good Night Out team will reassemble later tonight as the party ramps back up again. Dressed in pink, watchful, ready for whatever the night throws at them.

— This story was originally published by The Tyee.

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