The Vancouver woman known for directing traffic while rolling through major intersections on rollerblades is now on foot.
Why?
Roller Girl’s rollerblades have been stolen.
Angela Dawson, who has graced the city’s streets for many years keeping motorists and pedestrians safe, has been forced to slow down.
“I’m not Roller Girl without rollerblades,” she said.
She bought the new rollerblades mid-May with $700 she had saved up.
She put them down beside her on Main Street, and when she looked back, they were gone.
“I just had them broken in,” she said. “Somebody just totally walked away with them.”
Dawson described them as white, “very chic with pink laces.”
She said she feels invaded.
“I just wish I had them again,” she said. “It’s part of me. I just really need them. I make people smile.”
“I’m a Vancouver attraction,” she added.
In June 2023, a rollerblading charge against Roller Girl was dismissed.
Roller Girl claimed Vancouver police put her in danger when they stopped her at Main and Keefer on April 20, 2021 while rollerblading behind a truck. She was charged with unlawfully coasting/sliding with an apparatus on a street.
She argued rollerblading was part of who she is.
"I love preventing death. I like to enhance society,” she told Glacier Media at the time.
Roller Girl has taken on the Vancouver Police Department before and won. In 2015, she won a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal case after being refused access to medical care in jail and referred to by her dead name.
The tribunal found that Dawson was discriminated against based on sex because she told officers that she was a transgender female and was not treated as such.
The tribunal ordered the Vancouver Police Board to pay Roller Girl $15,000 in damages for "injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect."
She’s also thrown her hat into the political ring at times, having run for mayor of Vancouver in 2018 and the park board in 2022.
