Context is crucial...here, have some...

activehistory.ca

Viewing the G20 violence through the lens of history...

This article originally appeared on ActiveHistory.ca. Ian Milligan is a third-year PhD student in Canadian history at York University. For his dissertation, he is studying the relationship between the New Left, Youth, and Labour in the 1960s and early 1970s. He is also a book review editor with Left History, a peer-reviewed academic journal published out of the history department at York University.

As Sean Kheraj, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of history at the University of British Columbia, noted in a blog post last week, many commentators seemed surprised by the police violence that gripped Toronto through the G20 weekend. Many of my contemporaries were surprised that Mayor David Miller and most of his counterparts (except for some subsequent rumblings from the provincial NDP and mayoral candidates) expressed their firm and complete support of police actions.

“Figures,” many resignedly noted, “politicians always have to support the police.” (To be fair, it was a bit less surprising when the polling numbers were released.) Well, no, they don’t, and a brief trip through Toronto’s 20th-century past can show us two things: first, that police violence and arbitrary use of power have a long history in Toronto. More important, however, we see that citizen action can spur meaningful regulatory change. We can do something. (For some hopefully helpful suggestions, along with a personal account of the G20, please scroll to the bottom of the post.)

Let me preface this by noting that much of this is dedicated towards policing structures and some of their senior leadership. While there are certainly abuses by rank-and-file officers, many others are hard-working, decent men and women whom I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with firsthand in my personal and professional life. The focus needs to be on structures rather than the individuals, although the latter certainly need to be held accountable.

Sean Kheraj has documented some instances of police violence up until the turn of the 20th century; let’s add a few more vignettes to this tale. (It will be far from exhaustive, I’m afraid, but hope it will give a bit of contextualization to the post-G20 discussion.) Through the First World War, Toronto police were noted for their vigorous prosecution of individuals who held contradictory political views. In 1917, Toronto newspaper editor Isaac Bainbridge was raided by the police for possessing anti-conscription literature that dared suggest that the war was fought for territory rather than liberty, and that the ruling classes were responsible for the war as opposed to the working people of all countries.

During the 1930s, the Toronto police under former Brigadier General Dennis Draper deployed its “Red Squad” to brutally suppress dissent and break up any public demonstrations that threatened the public order. Indeed, English would be the only language allowed at any radical public gathering, to ease police surveillance. Violators were arrested.

In a fascinating 2003 paper, "Revolutionary Claims: Recalling the Politics of the Pavement in Toronto, 1928-1932," Robert Oliver has argued that through the 1930s, “Spadina, Soho, Queen, Albert and Yonge streets became the new battlegrounds between the police and the Communists. While public meetings may have been crucial sites for party building, the suppression of them presented a greater propaganda opportunity.” For those of you not from Toronto, the G20 protests and events were centred around these very streets and intersections. The more times change, the more they stay the same.

It was not until the 1970s that serious calls appeared to challenge the power of Toronto’s police. At the 1973 Artistic Woodwork strike in North York, the Metropolitan Toronto Police ended up arresting 108 picketers and strikers during an especially lengthy strike by an immigrant workforce supported by the broad Toronto New Left milieu. This saw widespread violence: police were brutally assaulting young men and women, removing their identification numbers, fabricating charges (most notably accusing 78-year-old temperance crusader and former CCF MPP William Temple of assaulting a police officer and of being publicly drunk, which stretched all credibility) and essentially rioting against a large picket line.

Once a video of the violence became available to Toronto City Council, several councillors, led by future mayor Art Eggleton, actually called for the Metro police to be recalled from the police line. Councillors such as Dan Heap, Dorothy Thomas and John Sewell also voiced their discomfort with police actions. Indeed, the police chief stormed out of one meeting after refusing to provide his surveillance tapes to the council. Not that things weren’t polarized even then, of course: North York City Council voted their support of the police just as Toronto Council voted their non-confidence. (This is the subject of my own research.)

Through the mid- and late 1970s, attention increased towards police brutality, as discussed in Jeffrey Ian Ross’s Making News of Police Violence: A Comparative Study of Toronto and New York City. In October 1974, after a series of stories in The Globe and Mail, the province carried out a royal commission (the Morand Commission) on police brutality, which subsequently called for a complaints commissioner. On Aug. 6, 1979, 35-year-old Jamaican immigrant Albert Johnson was shot dead by police. Conflicting police accounts and a coroner's finding that the man was either crouching or kneeling when killed led some to speculate, as advanced by Johnson’s 9-year-old daughter, that police had forced him to kneel and shot him execution-style (as Christie Blatchford reported in the Toronto Star of Oct. 28, 1980). Two constables were charged with manslaughter and acquitted, leading to the formation of a defence committee, and Nathan Phillips Square became the site of many protests.

This, as well as several other incidents, at least led to the creation of the Office of the Public Complaints Commissioner in 1981 and the Special Investigations Unit in 1990 — however flawed these institutions continue to be due to the use of former police investigators.

Police brutality in Toronto is nothing new, nor is the use of police to suppress particular political messages. However, if there is any consolation, my impression is that many of the police excesses on the G20 Sunday/Monday were motivated more by confusion and lack of effective leadership than any deliberate strategy of suppressing a particular message in favour of another. (The case of the young Quebecer arrested on spurious "breach of the peace" charges because she had an anarchist book and black clothing aside).

Let’s hope that we can all learn from the recent and not-so-recent past, and help us all move forward as citizens. Only a small minority of police officers abuse their power — I’ve noticed that several have gone out of their way to be extremely polite lately — but let’s make sure they have the structures to enable them to do their jobs effectively, fairly and constitutionally.

So with that, let me end with a call to action. Let’s help make history. During the G20 summit and protests, I was witness to both the strange moments of seeing no police whatsoever (such as on Yonge St., hours after windows had been smashed) but also the over-policing of Sunday and Monday: random police "checkpoints" (read: gaggles of police officers) set up at my local subway station in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood as well as at Queen’s Park station before a protest at police headquarters. Young men and women were zip-tied, searched, ID'ed and released without any charges evidently being levelled. What happened was inexcusable, and let this be one more voice adding to the calls for a public inquiry.

Please consider donating to the Legal Defence Fund, set up through Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) at York University (the PayPal is down but you can send a cheque the old-fashioned way), affixing your name to a range of petitions, attending any local protests in your community, or by writing your MP or MPP. (Postage is free for the former.) Even if you don’t believe in the specifics of G20 protests, it is my firm belief that we need to show that our rights of assembly and to be free from arbitrary detention need to be vigilantly defended at every turn. Again, as Torontonians in the past have demonstrated, we can make a difference — and we must.

I tried to search this online but couldn't find an original e-version...so, i typed it in by hand...

literally ripped from the pages of today's Globe and Mail by me. this is evidence of political hypocrisy spanning decades up to present day...

from the archives
25 years ago:

The Globe and Mail reported that External Affairs Minister Joe Clark strongly condemned South Africa's use of emergency powers, saying that Canada was prepared to take tougher measures than the limited economic sanctions announced earlier in the month. Clark urded South Africa to stop arrests and detention of those who had participated in non-violent protests. Clark also called on the south african government to release Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned black leader of the banned African National Congress.

A people’s inquiry using arts, culture and communications to examine and respond to police actions during Toronto’s G20 Summit...

the problem i have with this initiative is in the second last paragraph where everyday people, are distinguished from "anarchists" and "vandals", who are clearly not everyday people but a completely separate class...actually two, since, in some cases even self defined anarchists or lefty types are going to great pains in order to differentiate between themselves and the people who smashed things at the riots, who always either seem to be constructed as police employed agents provocateurs or bad behaved violent activists who just don't know how to rebel in more peaceful ways.

i'm thinking of submitting a piece of creative non-fiction called "i'm an (alleged) violent protester?"...

seriously...i'm not fucking kidding. i really, really hate the way the nice, quiet, well-behaved kkkanadian lefty protesters are desperately trying to cling to some sort of weird ass moral high ground by internalizing the precepts of divide and conquer as if behaving in courteous ways towards people who have been hired by those who hate us will somehow in and of itself make change. i don't believe that at all and i think that those who do are seriously muthafucking misled.

A call to action

Over the course of the G20 Summit, held in Toronto in late June 2010, police ignored the civil liberties of Toronto’s citizens through illegal searches, detentions, and mass arrests — with Chief of Police Bill Blair making up the law and misleading the public as he went along. Hundreds upon hundreds of people have been searched without consent, assaulted and abused, profiled and harassed, and many have been beaten on the streets and in their homes, shot at with rubber bullets, gassed without provocation, detained for hours on end and arrested without cause.

Hundreds trapped by police and detained for hours at Queen & Spadina

Thousands are calling for an independent public inquiry into the abuses of power displayed by the police administered by the G8/G20 Integrated Security Unit during the G20 Summit Weekend. We too support this call, but recognize that public inquiries are often lengthy and costly, are frequently politically motivated and controlled by those in power, and can result in recommendations that are never fully implemented.

This is your invitation to join us in creating DON’T WEAR BLACK, a people’s inquiry using arts, culture and communications to examine and respond to police actions during Toronto’s G20 Summit.

Who will conduct the inquiry?

Artists, actors, writers, singers, musicians, dancers, speakers, crafters, teachers, students, photographers, videographers, twitterers, facebookers, makers, doers, audience members…you. Thousands of Toronto residents and visitors have stories to tell about the G20 weekend–some of them funny, some of them moving, some of them horrifying. We will ensure that you have your chance to raise your voice and share your story about what you experienced during that time.

What form will the inquiry take?

Artists, communicators and groups will be commissioned to develop and present an eclectic range of works based on the experiences of those who were swept up in the turmoil of the G20 weekend. A number of these will include innovative mechanisms for incorporating first-hand citizen testimony. In addition, a variety of ancillary events will provide additional context to the events of the G20 weekend, touching on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the War Measures Act, the Toronto bathhouse raids and other pivotal moments in the history of human rights and policing issues in Canada.

The target date for this inquiry is October 2010–the fortieth anniversary of the notorious October Crisis.

Why does this matter? Why don’t we just do as the politicians suggest, and put this all behind us?

The G20 may be over and the world leaders back in their respective countries, but for many the nightmare continues. The Toronto 1000 comprise the largest mass arrest in Canadian history–greater than those arrested under the War Measures Act and in the Toronto bathhouse raids combined. The vast majority of them are not anarchists or vandals but ordinary citizens who have been denied basic legal rights of access to lawyers, phone calls, food/water, medications while being kept in cages. There are accounts of detainees being taunted and humiliated, female prisoners strip-searched by male guards, fondled and threatened with sexual assault, a prisoner who is deaf denied an independent sign language interpreter, and specific targeting of Aboriginal, Francophone and Queer prisoners.

In time we will see charges dropped, prisoners released, settlements paid, class action lawsuits launched, reports from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Amnesty International, the Ontario Ombudsman and–one hopes–an independent inquiry or judicial review over what can only be described as the criminalization of dissent. But as we face weeks and months, and possibly years, before those resolutions are reached, we need to create our own opportunity to express our anger and sorrow, to understand and learn from what we all endured, and to bring each other strength. Above all, we need to take our city back–on our streets, and in our hearts.