Vancouver graffiti gone wild: An artist warns that the death of Vancouver’s graffiti program will lead to harder times for kids in need of a second chance
Vince Dumoulin was once a self-described criminal. He spent his early 20s jumping freight trains. He’d start in Montreal and make stops in Toronto and Calgary before arriving at the end of the line: Vancouver. He says he was a drifter with shoplifting and petty theft as his only means of income.
Along the way, Dumoulin slowly gained a rap sheet that inevitably caught up with him. By 2004, he’d been charged with theft and was routinely failing to appear in court. Run-ins with the police were almost daily, Dumoulin told the Straight.
“I was at a point where I had to make a choice,” he said in his apartment in the Downtown Eastside. “It wasn’t going to keep being petty crime. It was a decision of whether or not to get more hard-core and really dive into the criminal’s do-or-die mentality.”
Then, when he was in a rundown Vancouver apartment late one night, the police came by to check in on a friend of Dumoulin’s. One officer with an interest in art recognized Dumoulin and noticed a few of his drawings lying around the place. That chance encounter was the excuse Dumoulin had been waiting for. With his girlfriend’s help and the faith of a cop, he got out of the life.
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