Vancouver police deploy beanbag gun after violent Crosstown incident

Cellphone video captured Vancouver police using a beanbag gun to take a man into custody in Vancouver’s Crosstown neighbourhood on Wednesday.

It happened outside a Starbucks at Abbot and Keefer streets, on the edge of the Downtown Eastside, mid-afternoon.

Police were called to the scene after an altercation broke out between two men and a woman. It’s unclear from the video how the dispute began.

Vancouver police say they were responding to an agitated man who was “waving a knife in a threatening manner.”

The man was arrested at the scene, and no one was injured, police said.

Grant Coleman, who witnessed the incident, said conditions in the neighbourhood have been getting worse in recent months.

“We’ve got the Downtown Eastside right there, but it’s expanded pretty much all over the city — but Crosstown, huge deterioration over the last couple of years,” he said.

“Not to minimize it or maximize it or whatever you want to call it, it is literally twice as bad as what it was.”

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