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Cue the dark shadows

I don’t get what police chief Bill Blair doesn’t get. The chief told the House of Commons public safety committee on Wednesday that he was in the process of taking disciplinary action against about 90 officers who obscured their name tags during G20 protests.

The transgressors were being identified by reviewing over 22,000 hours of videotape – comforting to think all that police taping that drove demonstrators nuts during the G20 would come to some decent use. That’s the good news.

But then Blair went on to say he figured the sanction for renegade officers, who were clearly violating police services board policy, was the docking of a days pay. What’s that again?

Sorry, this doesn’t wash – a featherweight censure like this may be an acceptable compromise to the Toronto Police Association who’s head Mike McCormack says is cooperating with the investigation, but it’s not a punishment that fits the crime.

The ID cover-up was a much larger insult to the public realm, a deliberate attempt to undermine the key civil liberties principle that the state in a democracy is not anonymous and those who wield its power have to be named.

And none of the hundreds and hundreds of demonstrators who were pummelled, unlawfully detained, kettled, searched and generally frightened out of their skulls are likely to go for it.

Really, the airing of personal horror stories is all G20 protesters have been left with since the wheels of the police review processes have ground so molasses slow.

It’s now four months after the calamitous events and the Tories have resisted all pressure for a major probe – and will just keep doing so. And the lesser reviews are taking their royal time. We’re still waiting for the Office of the Independent Police Review Director to offer up some perspective. The police services board only named the head of its own Independent Civilian Review of G20 policing, John W. Mordon, in late September.

And here’s the kicker: by the time the review (whose mandate is quite narrow anyway) turns into a report, there will be a new Rob Ford cherry-picked police services board vetting it. Cue the dark shadows.

So, let’s let’s just keep telling the tales. Next week, November 10 and 11th, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, in conjunction with the National Union of Public and General hosts two days of hearings at the Westin Harbour Castle on police G20 activity and they’re inving the publice to offer up their experiences.

Sure, lots of these narratives have already been heard both in online testimonials and videos, info walls, and certainly from the mouths of deputants in the board room of police headquarters. But show up anyway. As the CCLA says, it’s a way of keeping constitutional rights in the public spotlight – and you know what? Bearing witness counts too.

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