When public institutions fail us

Just finished listening to a ridiculously shallow and badly scripted interview by Robyn Brown on CBC Radio's Here and Now with Farrah Miranda (was in the car, so I may not have the names right, and I'll correct if necessary) from the Toronto Community Mobilization Network. TCMN is conducting its own investigation of the violence and brutality inflicted upon peaceful demonstrators by police during the recent G20 summit in Toronto. Not surprisingly, this grassroots initiative stems, in part, from a recognition that there isn't going to be any meaningful institutional response. No one is going to be held accountable by the Police Services Board, the city, the province, or Ottawa.

So what's Robyn Brown's approach to this, but to badger Ms. Miranda for signs of “balance?” It sounds to me like you've got your minds made up already, she said – are you going to talk to the police and get their side of the story?

Wow.

Where to begin? How many things can you find wrong with this?

Well, let's start with intellectual laziness. That's very much in evidence in Ms. Brown's attempt to impose a facile “he said / she said” framework on the story. There aren't many stories that boil down to that. Framing it as “protesters say this, but police say that” makes it possible to ignore all kinds of complexities and shoehorn the story into a simple one-size-fits-all model. That may work for an eight-minute segment before you break for the news on the half-hour, and it may mean you can file your story without any conscious effort, but it doesn't do justice to the story or serve your listeners especially well.

And the suggestion that the Network organizers have their minds made up? Or that they ought to be talking to the police to get their side of the story? Let's see now. The Network is asking people to come forward with pictures, video and first-hand accounts of their treatment at the hands of police. In other words, anyone who was:

• gassed
• beaten
• tasered
• kicked
• shot with plastic bullets
• subjected to racial or ethnic profiling
• “kettled” in the rain at Queen and Spadina
• held without charge in the gulag on Eastern Avenue
• threatened with gang rape
• degraded by sexist and / or homophobic slurs, etc.

Associated with the CBC interview, I also heard one citizen describe how the bones in her finger had been shattered by a police baton. I also heard a doctor who was treating people for trauma, broken bones and concussion describe how police confronted her and confiscated her gauze, bandages and other medical supplies.

Just an observation, but I'd say those folks have already heard the police side of things quite clearly.

And it's not as if the traditional media outlets are going to devote any further air time or newsprint to these stories. They've got their images of broken windows and burning cop cars, and their interest in revising the narrative is pretty much non-existent. (Time to move on. Didn't Mel Gibson say something rude or something?)

If anything, the TCMN's initiative is just a further demonstration of the impotence of regular institutional responses – and of how traditional media outlets fail in their responsibilities. We already know that bodies such as the Police Services Board, not to mention all three levels of government, aren't even going to pretend to care about the citizens whose rights they're supposedly charged with safeguarding.

Citizenship and civic responsibility

I've been going on about the police and the G20 for some time. To the point, in fact, where my partner is starting to tease me about being a fanatic.

All of that concern about civil rights and fundamental freedoms needs to be framed in a larger context, and my choice for that framing is the notion of citizenship. There's a whole volume of conversations stemming from any effort to define citizenship and its attendant rights and responsibilities, but my intention here is mainly a statement of first principles.

I'm choosing to start from here because I think it's important to take back a large chunk of rhetorical and discursive turf from those who would characterize us strictly as "taxpayers." What a sad and limited view of our roles in civil society and our relationships with public institutions and with one another. I'll try to expand on the idea of citizenship in future posts, but I would argue that being a citizen means, at the very least, that you have obligations to your fellow citizens. Among those obligations are participation in the civic life of your community and a shared responsibility for the maintenance of public space.

Which brings me to the event prompting this post. The video above was shot with a pissy little cellphone camera, so the quality isn't great, but this is a little parkette on Broadview Avenue, just north of the TTC station. Sometimes I like to sit there with a coffee before getting on the subway. Until this morning, this parkette was a pleasant place to do that.

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When public infrastructure is neglected, the result looks like this. Or worse. This isn't about the municipal budget and how much it allots to maintenance of parkettes. Nor is it meant as a nagging public-service announcement reminding people to clean up after themselves. What I am saying is that maintenance of public space is a shared responsibility -- a responsibility that lies with governments, and that is discharged by judicious allocation of the resources we provide through our taxes -- but also a responsibility that lies with us as citizens. And when that responsibility is ignored or sloughed off, the result is a decline in our collective quality of life.

Officer Josephs, you're a credit to the badge

Res ipsa loquitur.

How do we hold them accountable?

I've been thinking for a few days about police officers and the obvious, glaring inadequacy of mechanisms supposedly designed to hold them accountable. We may or may not get a public inquiry in the wake of the way citizens were abused during the G20 weekend, but it's pretty clear that nothing's going to change and no one's going to be charged, suspended or otherwise disciplined.

The police board isn't going to do anything. The municipal, provincial and / or federal governments? The courts? Not gonna happen. At best, we might get some sententious declaration, a few months from now, that mistakes were made.

Even a well-resourced public inquiry with the power to compel testimony and make findings of fact - the Braidwood inquiry in British Columbia, for example - can't do much more than decide that subject officers don't have any credibility. At least in that case, the four RCMP officers who tasered Robert Dziekanski to death were held up for the public scorn they deserve.

What we saw during the G20, however, goes much deeper. We've all seen the videos, of aggressive and violent police attacking, abusing and shoving peaceful citizens. We've all heard the stories about outrageous and appalling violations of civil and human rights. What I'm forced to wonder is: where do they get the idea that it's OK to abuse the people they're sworn to serve and protect like this?

There's no shortage of examples, of course, but I'm struck by the particular egregiousness of this one. This York Region cop - a fairly senior one, if the three shoulder bars mean anything - starts pushing around a guy at least a head shorter than himself (1:40) and says "this ain't Canada" (3:57). Take away the badge and the uniform and he's pretty much indistinguishable from your everyday asshole on steroids - note the aggression, the bullying, the clear contempt for the people he's dealing with - but what's particularly noteworthy for me is his obvious knowledge that no one's going to call him to account for this. He knows he's untouchable.

Since we can't count on an institutional response, however, it falls to the broader activist community (that's right, activists - there's nothing wrong with activism, and the idea isn't going to be demonized or marginalized by the manufactured corporate narrative) to find our own ways of holding guys like this accountable. And in this case, I think that's accomplished by the video: it holds him up to the light so that we can see him for what he is.

Also, you've got to admire the cojones on this guy:

For some reason, this isn't going as smoothly as it should

So Toronto City Council has officially commended the Toronto Police for their "outstanding work" during the G20 summit. Is anyone really surprised?

As Chris Tindal argues, "I support the police" is Toronto's answer to "I support the troops." And, like the "support the troops" meme, the "support the police" banner is more than a simple declaration of political and civic sentiment. It's a strategy designed to reduce public participation and civic discourse to the level of bumper stickers and lapel buttons. It removes any need for reflection, for consideration of subtleties, for appreciation of nuance. In short, it removes the need for thought.

And more than that: it provides a quick and easy way to smear and demonize people who don't agree with you. Concerned about brutality and abuse and unconstitutional mass arrests? You must be soft on crime, you commie. Not only does it reduce a complex and constantly evolving social dynamic to a simplistic black/white question, it also provides a cheap and blunt rhetorical instrument for shutting down debate.

Fortunately, that strategy doesn't seem to be working as well these days. There's the story about John Pruyn, a 57-year-old guy with an artificial leg, and the way he was treated. Doesn't exactly fit the soft-on-crime storyline, does it. (Or the demonstrators-are-privileged-white-kids-crying-for-their-mommies-and-daddies narrative, for that matter.) You know that campaign's going nowhere when the story makes the National Post.

And then there's this story of Norman Perrin, a guy who was cited for bravery by the Toronto Police 20 years ago. He decided to return the citation in a signal of disapproval. Joe Fiorito tells the story of how he was received.

So, the violent-anarchists-trashed-our-city storyline isn't setting in quite as easily as the transmitters want.

Police kidnapping in Toronto from marsupilami dubitatif on Vimeo.

UPDATE: However, as Jen Gerson points out, it isn't just about police tactics and civil liberties. The more the debate centres around that, the easier it is to lose sight of Stephen Harper's culpability in the decision to stage the damn thing here in the first place.

This way to Authoritarian Avenue

(Photo by Jonas Naimark)

I've written at some length about the need to assert control over the way the story of the G20 summit is told. It's not going to be easy, given the institutional and political imperatives interested in spinning last weekend's events as a bunch of black-clad anarchist thugs trashing our peaceful city, yada yada yada. That doesn't make it any less important, however.

Just so we're clear: this isn't a story about a bunch of world leaders / political hacks / meat puppets for the corporate string-pullers getting together and agreeing on a whole bunch of things that'll make our lives a lot more painful. And it's not a story about a few morons breaking windows. And it's not a story about how thousands of riot cops couldn't protect a handful of cars, much as I'd like it to be about that.

No. This week's story has been about the corporate / state security apparatus using our fundamental freedoms for toilet paper. It's about people being locked up for hours without water, without being allowed to go to the bathroom, packed into cages like animals. It's about homophobic slurs and threats of sexual violence. It's about thuggish behaviour by people who know they can get away with it, because the mechanisms designed to ensure accountability are laughably weak.

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Last Sunday evening, my partner and I rode our bikes eastward on Queen toward Spadina. We were held up at Queen and Cameron, about a block west of Spadina, by a wall of bike cops, backed up by a phalanx of more heavily armed officers from various police forces. We could see by looking eastward that the intersection of Queen and Spadina was completely cordoned off, so we pulled up and just watched. As we waited, we watched the facial expressions change on the cops confronting us; shoulders straightened, muscles tensed, batons brandished openly. The front line of bike cops started herding us westward, ordering us to move back, buzzing their bike buzzers and pushing us. We all complied, but you can only move as fast as the guy behind you, and that wasn't quick enough for the officers pushing us westward, and they began shoving us. I couldn't help but wonder whether they were doing it because they figured they could, that their uniforms amounted to a licence to push people around?

Theodor Adorno's description of the authoritarian personality may provide some insight, but ultimately it pales in comparison to some of the stories emerging from the weekend. As it happened, while we were being shoved westward along Queen, several heavy-duty unmarked vans pulled past us to discharge the heavily armed tactical squads, and that was our cue to get the hell out of there.

Lisan Jutras' account of being caught in the kettle is required reading for anyone who wants a first-hand account of what was going on at Queen and Spadina Sunday night, and despite being caught in the rain and not allowed to leave for hours, she was one of the lucky ones.

Tommy Taylor's account of his arrest and detention is mind-blowing. Hours without water or a chance to pee. Homophobic slurs. Abuse of disabled prisoners. At the conclusion he, like hundreds of other people, is released without being charged. It seems apparent that the police knew they'd have a hard time making charges stick, but in the meantime, hundreds of people were abused, threatened and deprived of the basic rights we normally associate with living in an open society. Got a problem with that? Go complain. There are avenues for that, Dalton McGuinty assures us.

And then there are the accounts of people who were actively beaten, threatened and abused. Lacy MacAuley was arrested outside the makeshift gulag on Eastern Avenue. Her story sounds like something from behind the Iron Curtain. Amy Miller talks about cops threatening to gang-rape her.

In a few weeks, or perhaps months even, there may be an inquiry. Findings will be announced. Wrists will be slapped. Tuts will be tutted. And eventually, if we're lucky, someone will decide that the police - Toronto, OPP, ISU, RCMP, York, Halton, Montreal, Sudbury, Barrie, and anyone else who was invited to the party - had absolutely no justification for treating people the way they did. Feel better now? If you want to complain, there are established channels. Uh huh. Good luck with that.

This needs to be hammered on, repeatedly, all the more so because the MSM are getting tired of it. There's an implicit assumption that our attention spans are, well, limited. Yeah, yeah, there were a lot of smashed windows and burning cars, and maybe the cops overreacted, but there were a lot of smashed windows, and - oh, look! Something shiny!

And that's the dynamic that the corporate / state security apparatus is counting on. The more distracted / cowed we are, the easier it is for them to keep doing this to us. Yes, it's inexcusable how people were treated, and it shouldn't have happened, but by the time these processes wind their way to the end, people will have forgotten. In the meantime, the association of protest and activism with all the negative connotations continues, and the mere act of stepping outside your door becomes risky, unless you're planning on doing anything more than being a good little consumer / producer.

So, part of the narrative that needs to emerge from this weekend is: let's just keep in mind how fragile our fundamental freedoms really are. It's become pretty clear that those charged with serving and protecting us, and those who control them, don't think they count for much.

Truth to power, and other battle lines

Not surprisingly, the battle to define the history of the last few days is in full swing. The whole point of the story we're being fed, by the institutions of state/corporate coercion and their PR transmitters in the corporate media, is to marginalize and demonize the very idea of activism and dissent.

Moreover, this shouldn't be reduced to a one-dimensional debate over where we land on the left / right spectrum. Fundamental freedoms and their assertion in the face of things like free trade, summits and continentalism are not intrinsically left or right, and part of our task in fighting for control of the narrative is resisting that kind of oversimplification.