Organizer Testimonial: The Amber Alert on Whyte Avenue

**The following is an excerpt from a larger testimonial provided by an Edmonton harm reduction community organizer. It has been automatically transcribed using Otter.ai and anonymized. It has not been independently investigated and all incidents described therein are alleged. **

I'm very glad that no actual violence happened. But as someone who owns firearms and knows how to operate them. This really stood out to me as just like one of the most fucking scary things that I've seen a cop do in a while. There we were here doing street outreach, and there was an Amber Alert that had gone in, a kid had gone missing, and they thought that he had been abducted on a school bus. So police were basically going around the city, pulling over every single school bus trying to find this kid, and so they pull over a school bus over here by the funeral home near White Ave and the cops board the bus from the back through the emergency door with his car being drawn and pointed straight forward into the bus A where there are children at B pointed straight down gateway Boulevard towards the next act and meet patios, which were full at the time. And I was just sitting there watching this police officer draw a carbine to serve an Amber Alert full of a bus full of children in front of patios. And I was like, if they had fired that firearm, there is no chance in hell they would have hit their intended target. And there are hundreds of people who would have been in line of fire like this was such an absolutely stunningly reckless thing to do, and yet, these are the people that we are supposed to trust with with guns and firearms like these are who keep our community safe, but like, the very first rule of firearms is, do not point them at anything you are not willing to destroy. Right? The next act, patio should not be destroyed. Children should not be destroyed. It was the most deranged thing I have seen a police officer do, just like, casually, like this wasn't a high stress environment. There were no like, this wasn't like a known kidnapping. There was no notice that the kidnapper was armed. This was just straight, we are looking for a missing child on a school bus, and the response to this is, like, firearms drawn. Absolutely fucking insane. I was just like, I mean, they don't, they don't under they don't know how to do.

October 18, 2025

Edmonton Police Service

Harm Reduction Organizer Testimonial Recorded Summer 2025