Police state (G20 continued)

Nearly a month has passed since the G20, and I'm still slowly processing it in blog form.

Of course I got off easy (see the two entries below for my relatively unremarkable G20 stories). But many weren't so lucky. People were arrested – sometimes violently – for having a screwdriver in their pocket, for walking home from work, for wearing a black t-shirt. A couple of 17-year old girls were arrested for blowing bubbles. (Can you imagine being their parents during the 12 hours that they were not allowed to phone?)

I don't use the term 'police state' lightly, but that was exactly what they turned downtown Toronto into for almost a week. It was an armed camp with fortifications. I can't explain how creepy it was to move through those normally bustling streets, near deserted, except for heavily armed, black-clad cops everywhere, far outnumbering the civilians.

And anyone within miles of the dowtown area could be subject to arbitrary arrests and searches without a warrant.

The right to be free from arbitrary policy power, arrests, and searches; the right to be presumed innocent; hell, the right to freedom of speech – those are rights that our ancestors fought revolutions and wars for. Good people died for them. They underly our claim to be a free society, to not be an evil totalitarian regime.

This isn't Iran or North Korea. The people who were arrested weren't killed or tortured. They didn't simply disapear for disagreeing with the government. And life in Canada is not normally like it was during the G20.

But what is so scary is how easily so many of the rights disappeared at the slightest stress, at the slightest threat. There were, at most, a few hundred 'Black Bloque' protestors. On their account, the police and the powers that be criminalized tens of thousands of peaceful protestors – not to mention ordinary Torontonians try to go about their business.

For what? For what did they revoke rights, arrest and brutalize peaceful protestors and ordinary people going about their ordinary lives?

Well, the 'Black Bloque' caused some property damage. As far as I can tell they never hurt anyone – never targetted or attacked a person. I am not condoning them or their tactics, but the same can't be said for the security forces, who terrorized and hurt, I think I can say without exagerration, thousands. (Almost a thousand people were arrested, and judging by my experience you didn't have to get arrested to feel intimidated and scared).

The ironic thing is that they did terrorized so many, they spent so many hundreds of millions of dollars on security, they carted in over 10 000 cops from across the country... and from all appearances and first-hand accounts I have had shared with me, they did basically nothing to stop the Black Bloque rampage.

I'm not one for conspirary theories (and I don't really believe the one I'm about to propose) but it almost makes you wonder if the police let the Black Bloque run rampant so that they could justify clamping down. So that they could justify the exorbitant security measures and obscene expense that came with it.

Another story about the G20

So after almost getting forcefully arrested at the 'bike bloc' protest (see the post below), I had about an hour to kill on my way back through downtown to my workplace.

As I biked, I started thinking about how I had been to two protests and still hadn't even seen the infamous G20 fence. There had been a lot of coverage in the media about this fence (or more properly, fences) which, from the sounds of it, could survive a full military assault involving tanks and bombs. And imagine – a billion dollar security operation employing 14,000 cops so that the leaders are not only 'safe,' but guaranteed to not even see those trying to send them a message. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, not to see any of these decision-makers, not to see the place where they were meeting, but to at least see the fence they erected to separate themselves from everyone else?

So naturally I got stopped by a group of policeman heading down Yonge Street (one of the main drags in Toronto). Pretty soon they were going through my bag. They claimed they could search me without a warrant because I was on 'highway' (for those of you unfamiliar with the city, Yonge Street is no 'highway' under any normal usage of the term). The way they explained it, anyone on a road or sidewalk – or near one – could be subject to search without warrant – which contradicts just about every representation I've ever heard of civil liberties. When I brought up the now infamous 'five metres from the fence' Public Works bill amendment secretly passed by the Ontario cabinet (or maybe 'not passed,' depending on who you ask, now that they're backpeddling), they asked suspiciously why I knew so much about it. (I read about it on the front page of the Toronto Star).

Now, I had two empty dishsoap bottles in my backpack so that I could stop off at an environmental shop on the way home and refill them with detergent. Apparently, such things are suspicious and dangerous weapons! They had a really hard time understand the concept of refilling bottles so as not to waste plastic. One officer came over, swore at me and called me a liar while I was trying to explain it to two others. They confiscated them and a glass iced tea bottle I was using as a water bottle. (They said protesters had been filling bottles with urine and throwing them at police).

I offered to bike away from the fence, if they left me the bottles. They said no, but that they could write me a receipt for my bottles, and I could come collect them at the police station after the G20. (Ah, bureaucracy). They obviously didn't want to, but I said they were inconveniencing me, so I felt like I might as well return the favour.

Of course, then they got to the bike tools in the bottom of my bike bag. (After suffering a lot of break-downs in the space of a year, I started carrying them with me everywhere). I admit my heart sank a little – of course, soon they were speculating about whether I was planning to use them to cut my way through the fence. (How I would do this with a screwdriver, a few wrenches and a patch kit, I don't know).

At this point, one of the officers took pity on me (or got lazy?) and offered to let me keep the tools if I biked away in the opposite direction and didn't come back. And they would keep my bottles, and not give me a receipt.

So I did.

A story about the G20

So... I went to the Toronto G20 protests a couple of weeks ago. I've never been a protest/activist kid, but I figured I am against pretty much everything the G20 stands for (i.e. unbridled capitalistic and technological development at the expense of humans and the environment). Most of all, I wanted to stand – albeit in a tiny and probably inconsequential way – against what "security" forces were doing to my adopted city. I wanted to say to say I was not afraid, despite the forces of paranoid violence being marshaled in the name of said "security."

(I probably should have been more afraid).

So I went to a march on Friday, and then a Critical Mass-inspired bike protest on Sunday, after the shit had gone down Saturday.

I liked the bike protest. Biking is fun, it was explicitly non-violent, and the participants seemed to be mostly locals. (I admit to having a hard time respecting protest tourists, and when travelling to other cities, people rarely bring along bikes along – they don't fit in duffel bags very well). The police had a much harder time blocking and boxing off a flexible, mobile group of cyclists than they did marchers.

(And they did that quite a bit. It is quasi-understandable that the police would block off streets leading down to the infamous fence, but they also seemed to delight in randomly blocking off legitimate peaceful protesters whenever possible, whichever direction they might be headed.)

Right as we were about to start, some guy got up and said 'there are no leaders of this protest, but if you want to do something violent, please go somewhere else.' Then we tried to get on the road, but the police blocked us off. There was a small gap at the back – not enough police to completely pin us in that far from the fence apparently – and we slowly trickled out, even as police continue to block, harass, and sometimes grab people trying to get onto the road with the rest of the group.

After a few hours, the ride ended at the temporary detention centre. (Strangely, a line of police had channeled us right toward it – though several people within the group had been advocating that as a final destination for some time). We dismounted and chanted various things in support of those inside. Conditions inside were pretty terrible from what I've heard, and people were routinely denied a phone call for over 12 hours – it was again, a tiny thing, but we hoped they might hear us and know that people in the outside world cared.

I ended up on the left edge of the crowd (picture a T intersection with the protesters at the centre, facing the detention centre and its fence). Suddenly a bus pulled up and a bunch of riot cops started getting out on the road to the left of me. They quickly formed up into a line about 15 feet away.

We formed our own line, holding our bikes in front of us. Because I was on the edge of the crowd, to my chagrin, I found myself one of those on the front line. We were chanting 'peaceful protest, peaceful protest' (probably the most common chant the whole ride long).

I couldn't really believe it, but after a couple of minutes of standing there, the riot police started advancing on us shouting 'move.' Those of us right up front nervously edged back a bit, but there really wasn't anywhere to go. (I later learned that lines of riot cops had descended from the two other directions of the intersection – they had us surrounded, with nowhere to go).

As they got close, one riot cop lunged and grabbed the girl beside me, immediately assisted by those beside him. They threw the girl behind the line, separated her from her bike, pinned her to the ground, tied her up with their plastic cuffs, and dragged her away.

That description doesn't really do justice to how brutal and violent they were to her. It seemed like they were hitting her, but I admit to being fairly distracted by the cops that were right there in front of me – about, I thought, to do the same to me.

They grabbed a couple of other people at the same time, and a couple of other people's bikes – I just saw what happened to this girl up close and personal, which is why I'm telling you about it. The line of cops actually stopped advancing as we began yelling 'shame, shame,' but I don't know if those two facts are causally connected.

We sat down. After a while, a cop with some sort of authority came and tried talking to us. He told us it was illegal to sit and stay in one place. Apparently, as long as we kept moving that was ok, but it was 'illegal' to protest by sitting in place. Now remember that they had us surrounded and blocked off – there was no place to go. Some people pointed this out, but nothing seemed to come of it. At one point a couple of 'protesters' walked out of the crowd and got a big handshake and friendly greeting from this head cop; they didn't rejoin those of us sitting down.

More time passed, and more riot cops with huge guns (for tear gas pellets, presumably) started climbing out of armoured vehicles. A lot of us started feeling like it might just be time to move on, and apparently they were now letting people out at the back of the T intersection. I actually had to go back to work in an hour or so – there was a person in wheelchair relying on me to help him eat and go to bed, which had made me a lot less ok with the idea of getting arrested all along.

So I biked away. That wasn't the end of my adventures that day, but that's enough for today's storytime.

Happy Birthday Canada

O Canada, we are so ashamed of thee.



Well, specifically, of the goons that run 'thee.'