The parade of security personnel and their gadgets on Thursday, June 3, at the Integrated Security Unit (ISU) presser-cum-peep-show was a stunner.[rssbreak]
Wandering through the parking lot of the Toronto Police College at Islington and Birmingham listening to the Canadian Forces, tactical squad, RCMP and the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives team explain their summit functions, I started to feel pretty numbed-out.
Perhaps this was the intended effect.
On the one hand, police transparency is what we’ve always asked for, and here were friendly officers explaining with good grace how they would keep crowds in order, defuse chemical threats and unchain direct-actionists.
But on the other, weren’t we just being co-opted to spread a message of fear? Not to sound conspiratorial, but military display generally seems to make people less confident about where the limits of self-expression are being drawn.
Free speech is always contested terrain, of course. In the 70s, anti-war protesters got arrested for marching onto Yonge last week, Free Gaza activists spontaneously shut down the city’s main drag and police deftly redirected traffic.
But back to fear: on Tuesday morning, June 8, at a Community Mobilization Network press event at the Toronto Convention Centre, the Summit Legal Support Project’s Kevin Tilley complained of 28 incidents where security officials attempted to seek info from local protest organizers – some at home or at work.
“It’s a pattern of making contact in an intimidating way,” Tilley said, pointing out that one case involved an immigration threat. Some of these incidents involved officers showing up at planning meetings and being asked to leave.
Now, the details of these cases were not on offer, so it’s hard to assess exactly what’s going on. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been concerned in general about how police approach activists, and has developed criteria to distinguish acceptable overtures from scary ones.
“It’s not in and of itself objectionable that security forces try to establish dialogue,” says the CCLA’s Abby Deshman. “It’s the way they do it,” she says, adding that some people, of course, see any police presence as threatening per se.
The ISU has its own sense of what these visits are about. Sergeant Leo Monbourquette says the ISU’s community relations group has a mandate to reach out to activist organizations – if they’re interested. “They’re trying to facilitate protesters’ right to protest in a safe and secure manner,” he says.
And let’s be clear: it’s a direct result of the Hughes report on RCMP bungling at the 1997 APEC protests that police have been repeating their mantra that it’s their job to help demonstrators get their message out.
But then there’s what goes down when it gets hairy on the streets. And that’s why, on Saturday, June 5, a classroom on the fifth floor of OISE was abuzz with legal-observers-to-be getting trained up for the G20.
The Summit Legal Support Project’s Mike Leitold tells me the group has already recruited 100 monitors and has a roster of criminal lawyers ready to represent those arrested.
“We don’t consider ourselves neutral. Our folks are focused on police excesses. We’re concerned about the militarization of crowd control techniques and unlawful restrictions,” he says.
And they won’t be the only monitors out there suffering through the heat and the confusion. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, too, has a team – with a slightly different mission.
The two orgs refer to a friendly division of labour, but there are some subtle philosophical differences. According to the CCLA’s Deshman, its team is strictly independent, not at all part of the protest phalanx. They have clarified their role to police (the SLSP deems this unnecessary) and will be working toward a composite picture of how security forces sustain Charter rights.
“There’s a pattern of ever-increasing security budgets, but there’s no reflex on the other side,” says Deshman. “Every time there’s a mobilization of security forces, there are new precedents [limiting rights].”
The CCLA has raised several worries, among them that police will use mass arrests of peaceful and even “disruptive” or “inconvenient protesters” to detain and thwart legitimate expressions of dissent.
It’s a vigilance game from here on. No one knows that better than BC Civil Liberties’ David Eby, an Olympics protest legal survivor.
Despite some nasty happenings there, Eby says, “in general police had a hands-off approach. We thought that had to do with the presence of legal observers and our work around free speech. I can’t emphasize how important the observer program was.”
One activist put it another way: “Civil liberties” is a verb.
ellie@nowtoronto.com
