Shut the F**k Up!

I'm getting the impression that some people have now adopted the Conservative Motto about police behaviour at the G20 protests.
They seem to think the issue should just go away.
Shorter Christie Blatchford and Macleans magazine:

I just can't stand hearing any more about this mess so why don't you all just shut up! SHUT UP!

But we won't.

Saddest story yet

To protest the way the police treated the G20 demonstrators, a Toronto man gives back the Bravery Citation he had received from Toronto police:

...Norman avoided downtown that weekend but he, like everyone else, knew what was going on. “The air was full of people talking about what had happened to their friends.” A thousand arrests, people being stopped for no good reason, ID demanded, and so on. . . "they were arresting people two miles away. And then we heard the premier saying that no new powers were given to the police. If that’s the case, what protection do I have now? And what the hell can I do about that?”
The question was not rhetorical.
“I can give this back.”

Others in Toronto were also upset at what they saw. Paul Pritchard, the person who recorded the Dziekanski tasering has a summer job as a waiter in Toronto:

Armed with his camera, he arrived by bike at Queen’s Park in time to see a man bowled over by a police horse. In his view, a young, peaceful crowd of protesters was under assault.
“I got up right on the front line. The guy beside me got shot with a rubber bullet. I was half expecting to get stomped, or beaten. I thought my camera was going to get broken for sure.”
He slipped the memory card from his camera, hiding it in the side band of his boxers. People were crying. Some jeered, others taunted. He only ever saw one item thrown, possibly a stick, the culprit immediately called down by other demonstrators.
On the other side, he saw, “Anger. Hostility. Using force. Using intimidation. You could see it in their eyes.”

Worst yet

The worst G20 story yet:

As Sarah began pleading with them to give her father a little time and space to get up because he is an amputee, they began kicking and hitting him. One of the police officers used his knee to press Pruyn’s head down so hard on the ground, said Pruyn in an interview this July 4 with Niagara At Large, that his head was still hurting a week later.
Accusing him of resisting arrest, they pulled his walking sticks away from him, tied his hands behind his back and ripped off his prosthetic leg. Then they told him to get up and hop, and when he said he couldn’t, they dragged him across the pavement, tearing skin off his elbows , with his hands still tied behind his back. His glasses were knocked off as they continued to accuse him of resisting arrest and of being a “spitter,” something he said he did not do. They took him to a warehouse and locked him in a steel-mesh cage where his nightmare continued for another 27 hours.

This story is going viral.

"Arrest orgy" is what it was

Reading story after story after story after story after story about experiences during the G20 protests, one common thread strikes me -- they all include cruel, contemptuous, crude, or incompetent behaviour by the police.
At Macleans magazine, Adam Radwanski attributes police swagger to the lack of meaningful oversight:

. . . the message from governments to police, even before the saga over the provincial regulation, was that politicians preferred a no-questions-asked approach to security [and created in police] the sense that they had free rein to do as they saw fit, whatever part of downtown Toronto they happened to be in.

Boris at Galloping Beaver provides a deeper analysis. He calls it an "arrest orgy" and he thinks the growing backlash may eventually impact Canadian police the way Somaila affected Canada's armed forces:

With our police, where is a critical look at things such as the influence of new offensive technology such as Tasers, the universal provision of body armour, tactical clothing as work dress, and their cumulative effects on police self-perception and attitudes? Are their certain mindsets that have popularised and hardened within police departments? Does public outcry and investigation over their less than honorable actions actually serve to reinforce organizational insularity and promote further brutality? We saw them close ranks around Dziekanski foursome, and it seems as if the police may have used the G8/20 as a venue through which to hit back at "us" whom they may view as unappreciative and condescending.
...
Where the torture and murder of Shidane Arone may have been a catalyst of an overhaul of the armed forces, the death of Robert Dziekanski and the arrest orgy in Toronto may prove catalysts for an overhaul of Canadian policing. These events are symptoms of larger problems.

Today we finally found out that 16 people are still in jail a week after the G20 ended -- including a street medic who is apparently going to be charged with carrying a concealed weapon for carrying bandage shears.
And a woman from Peterborough has been charged with obstructing police and wearing a disguise with intent to commit an indictable offence -- she came to the protests dressed as a clown.

You're a grand old flag

One of the best production numbers ever filmed

Toronto Pride

I hadn't realized that the Pride Parade originated as a protest following the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids. I would imagine the people involved in those first marches would never have believed that, just 30 years later, a million happy people now celebrate gay pride.

If you bought a car from IKEA

This is what you would get

plus instructions.
(From Mr Jam)
Oh, and that reminds me:

Hold your own hearings!

Notwithstanding that 35.000 people have now joined the Facebook group Canadians Demanding a Public Inquiry into Toronto G20, the recent Angus Reid poll now being trumpeted by the press would indicate that a government inquiry just ain't gonna happen:

When asked about the reaction of the police in Toronto to the demonstrations, two-thirds of Canadians (66%) and three-in-four Torontonians (73%) believe it was justified.

So there we are -- everything was the protesters' own fault!
Or, at least, that's what the Harper Conservatives and the McGinty Liberals would dearly like everyone to conclude.
Nobody died. Nobody's grandmother was tased. No cabinet minister's daughter was pepper-sprayed or arrested. Clouds of tear gas did not sicken thousands. There are no visuals of people being knocked off their feet by water hoses.
Instead, the visuals were of burning police cars and broken windows -- not exactly images which will enrage the general public about what police did, as opposed to what protesters did. And even though there is still a trickle of news stories about how confusing everything was, there are no editorials demanding explanations of how a billion dollars was spent, and why Toronto police chief Bill Blair has repeatedly lied about summit events.
So regardless of Elizabeth May and the Canada Day protests, the likelihood at this time that the Harper Conservatives or the McGinty Liberals would ever order a public inquiry into police actions during the G20 protests is zero.
If the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Amnesty International and Greenpeace and labour unions and student groups want to have an inquiry into police actions during the G20 protests, they are going to have to do it themselves.
Its been done before. It needs to be done again.
There are already some G20 stories written down already, if reporters happened to hear them, and there are already lots and lots of videos and photos already posted all over the place -- one of the most noticeable things about the crowd shots during the whole G20 weekend was how many people were photographing everything they were seeing.
Even without subpoena powers and a government budget, a narrative can be written about what went wrong during these protests -- hearings can be held, stories assembled, videos and photos pulled together, a timeline constructed,and the locations and participants documented. This will prove that police disappeared on Saturday when the cars were being burned and windows broken, only to re-appear later to pursue and arrest ordinary protesters and passers-by.
And may even help us figure out, why?
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the CCLA has already issued a preliminary report of their observations during the summit

. . . after 5PM on Saturday, the constitutional protection against arbitrary detention and unreasonable searches had effectively been suspended across downtown Toronto.

Who are you going to believe?

Christie Blatchford and Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, or your lying eyes?
Here's what Blair says happened last Friday during the repatriation ceremony of a soldier killed in Afghanistan:

“The Black Bloc was here and they charged up the thing [laneway], as a matter of fact the repatriation was kind of interrupted,” Chief Blair said.
“My public order guys ran through the lines that we had to close off the alley that they were trying to get up [to Grosvenor] with". . . he had to tell Sgt. MacNeil’s escort, “Sorry, it’s over, get out of here because it’s too dangerous.”

Thanks to Dave at Galloping Beaver, we now have photographic confirmation of these horrendous events. Here's a photo of the wild crowd that ruined this ceremony:

Here is a video of how disruptive they were:

WTF?

The boys defied the predictions and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, but I join the thousands of head-shaking fans at the stadium asking WTF -- too many men? Again?
Somebody on the Rider bench is suffering from dyscalculia.

Oh, Canada

I have sometimes thought this should be our national anthem.

Likely just another lie

So Toronto police leadership now say they knew by Friday that their "five-meter security zone" at the G20 summit was not an accurate depiction of the new regulation.
And they now say they informed their police officers about this change.
So we're supposed to believe that, at a time when journalists and newspaper editorials were talking about little else, and at a time when this regulation was radicalizing tens of thousands of protesters, absolutely none of the police officers monitoring the summit could be bothered to mention this significant change to any of the media or protesters?
Oh, sure.
Hung them out to dry, that's what they did -- their leaders knew police didn't have the authority they thought they had, and they let them rough people up and arrest people anyway.

Dumb dumb dumb de dumb

Shorter Toronto police chief Bill Blair:

Just look at all these terrible weapons we confiscated from the G20 protests!
Well, except for the crossbow and the chainsaw, we found those Thursday in the car of a mentally ill man driving downtown by mistake.
But everything else was ...
Well, except for the arrows and the chainmail and the shields and the plastic clubs. We got those Sunday at Union Station from a guy on his way to a fantasy role-playing game in a local park.
But its absolutelytrue that everything else was taken from protesters. Really! Would I lie to you?

I finally figured out who Blair is reminding me of:

Lies

So Toronto Police chief Bill Blair thought he had played a cute trick on "criminals" when he lied about police having the authority to detain and arrest G20 protesters outside the security fence.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is still furious about the way police behaved during the G20 protests.
But the people who should also be furious are the thousands of front line police officers who actually believed they had been given temporary authority to detain and search people at will -- who now find out that they were being lied to, as well.



UPDATE: And Blair is caught lying again.

Keeping Toronto safe?

Toronto police made a big deal today about they protected Toronto from Black Bloc violence by arresting 900 people.
Except, of course, they didn't.
On Saturday, the Black Bloc vandals were allowed to throw things at police, jump up and down on those artistically-abandoned police cars and then run down Yonge Street breaking windows and uprooting bricks unimpeded.
But on Saturday night and Sunday, even though I heard no reports of projectiles being thrown at police, no broken windows, no looting, no trashed cars, the police were very busy arresting polite teenage girls, Quebecers, reporters, and people shopping for groceries.
And now they seem to think that bullying people who were too scared to fight back was what kept Toronto safe.
According to the police chief, police arrested "dozens and dozens" of anarchists with "Molotov cocktails and other weapons" on Sunday --where these people are now, I couldn't find any news stories to say. I guess at some point, maybe there will be some bail hearings, and then maybe we'll find out just how many arrests of criminals and vandals were actually made. Until then, colour me skeptical.
Torontoist reporter Chris Bird writes:

. . . The cops had a disastrous top-down management strategy, to be sure, but over and over again the story of today was that some individual police were completely and totally willing to be bastards.. . . apparently guilt by association is the next big thing in Canadian policing.

Oh, and there was another large protest today -- to object to the police overreaction. Nobody was arrested this time.

The Canadian spirit is just indomitable.