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As we get closer to the bar-filled zone of lower St. Laurent, more groups of people stop us, asking for photos with LightStep. The level of general inebriation in the streets is overwhelming, especially given it's not even midnight.We stop to buy crack pipes—to be given away free to users as a method of harm reduction—and LightStep puts them in a backpack along with the first aid kit, needle collection containers, latex gloves, condoms, socks, gloves and hats."Hey, do you need a pipe?" LightStep asks a guy in a raggedy coat in his early twenties."Nah, man, but do you know where I can find some dope?" No, LightStep doesn't know where to get dope.We continue our trek south, towards Berri-UQAM square, which at this hour is populated by drug dealers and junkies. "I've had junkies throw needles at me… jokingly, but I still had to dodge them," LightStep says. It was also in Berri Square that I learn about LightStep's origin story.
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This was one of only three instances LightStep's ever called the police in two years. "I think it's really fucked up to call the police on people with mental health issues, but in this case, this guy had intention to use his gun to harm someone, and that was enough."
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We watch small crowds in costume dissipate into the bars and clubs of the Montreal's Gay Village and check in on a girl who we think is crying on a stoop. She smiles an energetic smile back at us and keeps talking on her cellphone.We loop around and start heading west towards downtown. I stop in a Tim Hortons to get a coffee and warm up, and from the line I watch LightStep chat up a stranger. "That guy recognized me from my plainclothes patrol," LightStep tells me later. "He's a sex worker around here, we've met many times." There seems to be a special place in this masked stranger's heart for people who also roam the streets at night, who share this space with them. There was a connection there, something that was broken the moment I walked into the conversation. "See ya around," the sex worker says.At the corner of St. Denis and Ontario, a crowd gathers near an ambulance. We get a closer look and LightStep wants to make sure the person on the ground will be taken care of properly.
LightStep is very skeptical of the police, and that is one of their motivations to go on patrol, in the hopes that the project will turn into something bigger. "The police state is encroaching, there's an increasing militarization of the police, an increasing crackdown of our rights and freedoms, especially in the wake of all this terrorist jingoism," Lightstep says indignantly. "Two dead soldiers from terrorist attacks, and 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women and [they say] it's not sociological?"
We continue our hike north on St. Denis and turn west on Sherbrooke towards where we started. We cut into St. Louis Square through a shiny new condo with a colorful flowerbed mostly dead from the frost.
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We continue up St Laurent. It's about closing time for the bars and the street is flooded with people in bad Day of the Dead makeup and cat ears. There are lots of cops everywhere. We stop on the corner of Roy, and I count eight cops and three cars, plus an ambulance. There's a man in a white hoodie lying by a storefront, and we try chatting with him. He's very intoxicated, his hands covered in blue body paint. We find out his name is Matt and try to get him to get up and into a cab, but instead he pukes on the ground and lies down. We wait around a little bit longer, since LightStep wants to make sure Matt gets to a hospital.I get the feeling that this is what LightStep does most—stepping into situations where something could go wrong, and just talking to people and observing."Looking for crime to fight—and that's what other Real Lifers are always talking about—that is to misunderstand crime, to misunderstand poverty and desperation and all these other things that cause violence in the first place." LightStep tells me we can't celebrate yet, that people are hungry, that there is no place to sleep for some folks. "We need to find a way to inspire ourselves to participate in our community," they say.It's around four in the morning when Matt finally gets into an ambulance, and by then it was time for LightStep and I to part ways.By the end of the evening I realize that LightStep isn't so much the person under the mask—the slender, vegan feminist queer—but rather a persona that exists with the help of this vegan feminist queer. LightStep could be anyone who is capable of getting up and taking direct action.Riding my bike north on St. Dominique I heard a girl scream "Why don't you just shut the fuck up and leave me alone?" I turn around, dismount, and approach the group of young women, who must have been around 19. There was a tall, large man walking behind them. "Is everything OK here?" I ask. A girl with a loud voice tells me they can't remember where they parked their car. Within four seconds of my arrival, the man goes away. Just like that. With a few simple deductions, I take the group to the probable spot of their car. The girl with the loud voice squeals and hugs me, "You saved us," she says.
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