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G20 cat and mouse

I’m staring out the window from my living room Sunday, catching my breath between visits to the detention centre protest and suddenly a police van rolls up and nabs three people in right front of my house. They are detained for some time and their bags searched thoroughly, revealing some black clothing within.

We’re two miles from the fence. So this is plainly illegal.

Problem is, I’m getting used to such happenings. Earlier in the aft, heading to Dundas on the way to the detention centre on Eastern, three undercover cops in a car came roaring the wrong way up my quiet one-way street just to check me out. “Who are you?” one of them asks. “Who are you?” I reply.

What was true last week about personal rights has no basis today I quickly remind myself. So I don’t even get to the part where I say “I live right here”. Instead, fearing an extended interrogation, I pull out my journalist credentials right away. They move on.

So here’s the deal: the city’s worst nightmare is turning out not to be the broken windows – though that’s been bad enough – it’s the way as the hours ticked away this weekend, our rights were being slowly drained away

Saturday’s outpouring, its sometimes humour-ridden standoffs with riot police, endless impromptu street takeovers and spontaneous marches, tweeting and texting to find friends and divine hotspots and the grabbing of quiet moments for food and quick on-the-spot analysis of the moment, was a socially complex affair.

That’s not apparently how police tacticians saw it. Instead they practiced a one size-fits-all style of crowd control, decades out of date. Our law enforcers, showed that despite their undercover officers, their overcover ones, intelligence networks and online monitors, they still don’t understand what protesting crowds are made of. The name of their game could only be described as collective punishment.

I spent almost 12 hours on the street Saturday, minus a 45 minute sushi break, and several hours Sunday, and I’ve seen every variety of participant from Steelworkers in their yellow hats and bandanas to ACTRA members with their yellow flags, university students, pink clothed radical cheerleaders, white-haired long-time supporters of all things fair and just, lots of tattooed folk and purple-tinged hair-dos, a rather lost looking soul in a PETA seal costume, a gaggle of protesters all sporting fake mustaches (what was their message?), marching bands and on-the-spot musicians banging on stainless steel water canisters, a woman dressed as a ballerina, an endless array of demonstrators willing to sit down in front of police lines, to hold hands and sing – and a contingent of people dressed in black with their faces covered.

There were two hundred Bloc Blocers and thousands of the rest of us – and that’s supposedly the reason police blocked us, threatened us with tear gas, marched with batons into crowds of us, drove horses in our midst so we fled in panic and questioned and detained us on the street. They formed lines in front of marchers in strategically negligible areas, exhibited huge operationally inconsistencies and seemed to be governed by a mysterious code of reasoning no one in the street could fathom or respect.

And despite the fact chief Bill Blair promised Queens Park would be a “safe” zone, by 6 o’clock Saturday, it was the most dangerous place in the city to be.

Saturday night – peaceful demonstrators at Novotel were mass arrested I interviewed two women from that location who had been detained for 12 hours and they weren’t even really activists. And no surprise: they were given no access to a lawyer, a violation of another promise made by Blair.

On Sunday morning, demonstrators sitting across from the detention center, were met with an onslaught of tear gas toting cops and blasts of crowd-dispersing chemical smoke. And the penning in of people at Spadina and Queen Sunday tonight will be food for recriminations and probably commissions for a long time to come.

The stories will just keep pouring in and while I’m not trying to minimize the frightening aspect of shattered glass, those smashed windows at Starbucks, CIBC, Aldo (for heavens sakes) etc. will seem, in the long run, like just a small part of the narrative.

As for the Black Bloc- don’t get me started. Of course, they’re nurtured by the cop overkill and all the testosterone in the air, but they’re a symptom of a real problem and I don’t just mean capitalism. The Bloc has taken the noble tradition of civil disobedience and dragged it through the muck. Breaking rules for the social good requires that the transgressor own up to the crime in the name of something grander. The Berrigan brothers didn’t destroy U.S. government draft documents and then put on disguises. They explained their anti-war mission and accepted their jailtime.

I laugh to think of Blocers taking responsibility and I’m tired of three days worth of movement people who should know better, telling me we have to respect their rights as activists. I can see a situation where someone might deface a gas station to decry oil’s fouling of the earth. But the next step would be to stay there phone the police contact the media issue the manifesto get arrested reimburse the no-doubt struggling independent who owns the franchise and explain oneself in court. It’s called being an adult.

Instead Blocers slipped in an out of their personaes by doffing their black outerwear. There one moment gone the next. I stood next to one on Queen W as he was taking off his black duds during one standoff. Coward. And up Bay later in the day there were little piles of discarded black shirts and pants. The broader movement likes to say “there’s no Black Bloc, only black bloc tactics.” Whatever.

Let’s just say, the masked mauraders were offered a huge tactical plum Saturday.

For one thing, at a crucial point there were no labour marshals to be seen at the Queen and Spadina corner as the huge parade passed on its way from Queens Park. This was really bizarre since even the most oblivious activist knew the Bloc was going to lead a contingent from the main march to “humiliate” security forces. Most of the march turned north but as a consequence of directional confusion in the ranks, Blocers and their supporters led the back end of the parade south to stare down the riot squad at Richmond.

All of which nicely gave trashers cover for their surprise move: they suddenly turned around and raced back east back along Queen to Bay, down to King and then up Yonge, smashing windows and defacing all the way. The shattered glass was shocking but my heart went out to the poor, stranded Queen street car, which was now altered with black scrawls, making me wonder how many of these could be local activists. As a friend asked later – aren’t streetcars inherently anti-capitalist?

The broader movement, of course, is faced with a dilemma. If it doesn’t work out an accord with this destruction cult, its members might not respect the peaceful zones of other protesters. But, it’s high time a wave of movement indignation sent the Bloc back into civilian clothes. There are enough forces out there conspiring to derail the message.

Blair said the other night there were no serious injuries to officers – no kidding. Ninety-nine percent of protesters had nothing to menace anyone with. Thousands of peaceful souls stood up to the scary sight of lines and lines of cops in riot gear and sometimes gas masks. As much as some would say: “oh, it’s become a game, what’s the point?”, I think there was purpose to the cat and mouse scramble over public space.

People this weekend really did have a sense that they had a right to gather en masse they felt strongly that being hassled by police was unjust and there was a generalized commitment to the idea that it was necessary to fight fear of authority at the pain of grave social consequences.

This wasn’t exactly what protest organizers wanted to put on the agenda, but when the challenge was offered, they did what had to be done.[rssbreak]

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