Canadian Police, Weapons Drawn, Arrest Woman In Stormtrooper Costume. She Had Plastic Blaster.
By James Barrett
In a video that has gone viral, police in Lethbridge, Alberta, can be seen converging on, surrounding, with weapons drawn, and handcuffing a woman dressed as a stormtrooper in celebration of May the Fourth after they received multiple “firearms” complaints over the woman’s obviously fake, plastic Star Wars blaster. Video of the arrest shows the woman crying hysterically while her boss tells police, “It’s a plastic gun!”
A “May the Fourth Be With You” promo by Coco Vanilla Galactic Cantina quickly escalated into an alarming situation, owner Bradley Whalen told Lethbridge News Now on Monday.
“We had music playing in the parking lot, we had one of our staff dress up as a stormtrooper kind of waving to people walking up and down the road, we had people stopping by and getting pictures with the stormtrooper, we put a couple of promotions on in the restaurant to entice people to come,” Whalen told the outlet.
One of Whalen’s female employees got into full costume that morning with the plan to promote the restaurant and interact with passersby. One of those potential costumers filmed his interaction with the employee — then ended up catching the stunning police response to the harmless promotional stunt.
Whalen told LNN that he believes that some residents must have somehow mistaken the employee’s plastic blaster for a real gun and contacted police, a suspicion confirmed by Lethbridge Police Service (LPS) Inspector Jason Walper, who told LNN that the department received two “firearms” complaints directing them to the block where the stormtrooper-dressed employee was marching around.
The incident comes a few weeks after 22 people were killed in a mass shooting in Nova Scotia, prompting an “assault-style weapons” ban in the country.
“At approximately 11:20 am, three police cruisers arrived and a truck followed shortly after,” LNN reports.
“Police officers had guns drawn, pointed at my employee,” Whalen told LNN. “They were yelling at her to put the gun down so she threw the plastic gun on the ground. At that point in time when I came out, she was on her knees kneeling down on the ground. The police had already checked and seen that the gun was plastic so they already knew that there wasn’t an issue or a risk there.”