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G8/G20 June 2010 Protest Watch

Wonderbread said:
I'm not surprised that there are so many people claiming to have been wrongfully arrested.  It seems as though cop cars were torched and windows smashed by only a few dozen people at most.  How is it that well over 1000 found themselves detained?

Just a simple case of wrong place, wrong time. 

Now I know personally a few people detained, but from their explanation they were standing there watching all the mayhem happening around them.  And as I said to them, if you weren't there watching, you wouldn't have been rounded up with them.  For the most part they understand why they were arrested, but bitter about the experience none the less.  And to my knowledge anyway, not part of any lawsuit. 
 
"All a-BOAAAARD, departing Class Action Litigation Station!"

Two residents of Toronto are spearheading a proposed class-action suit arising out of the mass detentions at the G20 summit in June.

The plaintiffs have named the city's police services board, Canada's attorney general and the police board from neighbouring Peel region.

The proposed action — on behalf of about 1,150 class members — seeks $115 million in various damages.

Among other things, the suit alleges the policies and procedures used during the summit violated the plaintiffs' rights.

It also claims false arrest and imprisonment, infliction of mental suffering and invasion of privacy.

The action, which has yet to be certified, is filed in Ontario Superior Court and none of the allegations have been tested of proven.
Shared in accordance with the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright  Act from the Canadian Press.
 
Somehow I just knew that it would come to this  ;D

"The action, which has yet to be certified, is filed in Ontario Superior Court and none of the allegations have been tested of proven."

:argument:
 
And in a related story several Toronto Lawyers were seen visiting the new Lexus showroom. 8)
 
1000 arrests does seem much, like they were just arresting anyone within reach. Seems amateurish.

It would have been nice to see the jerks smashing windows and breaking stuff arrested on the spot,  instead of various  bystanders.

Don't get me wrong, crowding around a bunch of outnumbered cops trying to make arrests is plain dumb and just asking for trouble. It just bugs me to see dumb mouthy  "I know my rights!" idiots arrested (Giving them exactly what they want)  yet see videos of the black bloc fools walking up the street unchallanged.
 
Danjanou said:
And in a related story several Toronto Lawyers were seen visiting the new Lexus showroom. 8)

Wait until we get our property tax bills.  :)
 
Apollo Diomedes said:
1000 arrests does seem much, like they were just arresting anyone within reach. Seems amateurish.[/quote[

Guess you weren't there.


Apollo Diomedes said:
It would have been nice to see the jerks smashing windows and breaking stuff arrested on the spot,  instead of various  bystanders.

Read up on BLACK BLOC tactics.  Once these idiots commit their acts of vandalism, they dispose of their outer black garments and disappear into the crowd.  Now, you, Apollo Diomedes, go and find them in a crowd of 20 thousand.


Apollo Diomedes said:
Don't get me wrong, crowding around a bunch of outnumbered cops trying to make arrests is plain dumb and just asking for trouble. It just bugs me to see dumb mouthy  "I know my rights!" idiots arrested (Giving them exactly what they want)  yet see videos of the black bloc fools walking up the street unchallanged.

These people claim that they know their rights, and in the majority of cases it is all bravado and a bluff.  They in actual fact don't know very much about the LAW.
 
George Wallace said:
Guess you weren't there.
Thankfully no. Were you "there? I don't just mean on Op Cadence somewhere in TO, I mean at ground zero on the streets where the riots were going on.
I'm sure lots of posters here were "there" but not in the middle of things.
Wonderbread seems to have been at ground zero but for some reason that doesn't seem to help his credibility. Is it because people just don't like what he's saying?

Read up on BLACK BLOC tactics.  Once these idiots commit their acts of vandalism, they dispose of their outer black garments and disappear into the crowd.  Now, you, Apollo Diomedes, go and find them in a crowd of 20 thousand.
Police presence would stop them from donning their masks I'm sure.  Much like the bait car left out in the open, it looked to me, based off various videos I've seen, that the police left places undefended and open to black bloc dickheads. I've heard one explanation for this being that the police couldn't guard the whole area and had to concentrate on securing the inner cordon or whatever, that makes sense. Arresting hundreds of by standers just seems like a waste when we could have used those cops to take a more aggressive role in catching the actual Vandals.


These people claim that they know their rights, and in the majority of cases it is all bravado and a bluff.  They in actual fact don't know very much about the LAW.
Agreed.  In some of the videos I've watched the police at times don't seem too sure of the laws themselves either but maybe that was deliberate.
 
Globe and Mail
3 Sept 2010
"Police made mistakes in G20 tactics, chief admits for first time":
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/police-made-mistakes-in-g20-tactics-chief-admits-for-first-time/article1694815/
 
mariomike said:
Globe and Mail
3 Sept 2010
"Police made mistakes in G20 tactics, chief admits for first time":
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/police-made-mistakes-in-g20-tactics-chief-admits-for-first-time/article1694815/
They checked the long gun registry and it cleared them to go, as none of the protestors were registered gun owners.
 
Old Sweat said:
They checked the long gun registry and it cleared them to go, as none of the protestors were registered gun owners.

Perhaps so. All I know about federal politics is what I read in the papers, and on here. Most of the gunshot wounds I was sent to were not reported by the media, as they looked to be suicides. I suppose in that state of mind, they just picked up whatever was available.

Regarding, "Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair’s admission Thursday that he made mistakes policing the G20 summit’s most controversial incident...", I would think he has had a chat with City solicitors in the aftermath of G20.:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/lawyers-question-why-blair-admitted-g20-policing-mistakes/article1696184/
I worked for a Toronto department that got sued a lot. The unwritten rule for us street-level types was clear: "Never, NEVER, admit the Department did anything wrong!"  ;D
 
Old Sweat said:
They checked the long gun registry and it cleared them to go, as none of the protestors were registered gun owners.


:rofl: :rofl:
 
7 Sept, 2010
Toronto Sun
"G20 protester launches lawsuit against police: A woman who alleges she was shot with rubber bullets by Toronto Police during the G20 summit is at the centre of a lawsuit expected to be detailed Wednesday.":
http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2010/09/07/15276021.html
 
A little dated.

Here reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act:


Life after the G20 protests
by Nicholas Köhler and Stephanie Findlay on Wednesday, August 11, 2010 9:00am

LINK

Two activists who spent 24 days in custody are out and talking—and the police are still listening

Leah Henderson was in bed when she heard the police break down her front door and tell Alex Hundert, her fiancé, and Mandy Hiscocks, the couple’s friend and fellow activist, to hit the floor. It was just after 4 a.m., and Henderson, who is 25, had a second or two to wonder whether she should get her pants on; when she saw the red dot of a gun scope bounce down the hall toward her, she decided against it.

This was in the early morning of June 26, the day that protests against Toronto’s G20 summit would devolve into a chaos of smashed windows and blazing police cruisers, much of it wrought by militant Black Bloc demonstrators. Crown prosecutor Vincent Paris has described Henderson, Hundert and Hiscocks, part of a small group of activists arrested during pre-emptive raids that day and now facing G20-related conspiracy charges, as “executives” of an anarchist group that helped organize the havoc. Their arrests, he added, followed a 14-month police investigation.


Now, after 24 days in custody, Henderson and Hundert are out on bail—$100,000 apiece—and each face nine charges, including conspiracy to assault a peace officer and conspiracy to obstruct justice. (Hiscocks, 36, faces outstanding charges and is out on $140,000 bail; she now lives under house arrest at her sister’s Ottawa home.) They are serious charges—Hundert faces a count of counsel to escape lawful custody—commensurate with the part authorities say they played in planning violent political protests that caused property damage into the hundreds of millions of dollars and triggered the arrests of over 1,000 people. The Crown has appealed the couple’s bail, a rare gambit lately seen in terrorism cases; the matter is slated for Superior Court on Aug. 19.

Yet during an interview with Maclean’s at Hundert’s mother’s home in Toronto’s Earls­court district, where Henderson is under house arrest, they present themselves as polite and articulate—social justice activists whose deep concern with both Aboriginal self-determination and the environment approaches the religious. With their chunky black spectacles, tattoos and long hair—his is worn in a ponytail—they accept the prospect of more jail time with almost martyr-like resignation. So severe is their anti-colonialist philosophy that they call themselves “settlers.” Such sympathy with militant First Nations groups is a common thread among Canada’s leftist radicals.

They refuse to discuss their roles in the G20 rampage, citing a publication ban, and will not comment on the mayhem; yet they stop well short of condemning it. Hundert is 30 and under house arrest at the home of his father, a Toronto health care consultant. His mother is a social worker who teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University, where Hundert himself studied global studies and religion. A former Whistler, B.C., ski bum, he did not become deeply involved in radical politics until he took part in a barricade that members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, north of Kenora, Ont., set up in 2006 to protest nearby logging. He went on to work with Aboriginal activists during the Caledonia land claim that year and, in the ramp-up to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, participated in a Guelph, Ont., protest in which an Olympic torchbearer was knocked over mid-run. Henderson, who met Hundert at the Grassy Narrows actions, which she helped organize, is from a left-leaning Edmonton family, and has been quoted on political issues as a protester in local newspapers since her early teens. A paralegal, her income pays the couple’s bills.

Weeks before his arrest, Hundert told the Toronto Star he had been approached by CSIS officers wondering about his plans for the G20. He refused to speak to the agents. Yet he may have already given them a good idea of what his intentions might have been. Writing on the left-leaning Rabble.ca, he defended the Black Bloc, calling it “a wrecking-ball tactic that makes space for more mainstream or creative tactics,” concluding: “People and communities are under attack and it is time to fight back. If you’re not willing to stand up and fight, or to support those who are, please at least get out of the way.”

The story of the couple’s stay in prison can sound at times like an ironic retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Arrested at gunpoint, then handcuffed—the police eventually put Henderson’s pants on for her—the trio began hearing their cellphones ringing madly as they sat outside the couple’s rented Bloor Street apartment in a police van; their fellow activists elsewhere in the city were also being raided. Henderson and Hundert were the first to arrive at the east Toronto film studio that police used as a temporary G20 detention centre—a place the size of a football field made all the more cavernous because it was still empty. Later, transferred to prisons in Milton, Ont., Hundert read the Bible, did pushups and watched World Cup soccer. Henderson and the other female G20 arrestees passed the time doing yoga and, out of bits of paper and empty sachets of sugar, fashioned a makeshift version of the Settlers of Catan board game.

They argue the charges and the police response to the G20 protests reflect a growing tendency in Canada to criminalize political dissent. Last week, after seeing the couple quoted in news reports—relatively innocuous statements in keeping with Hundert and Henderson’s anarchist bent—officers called their parents, who are acting as sureties, to warn that the couple risked breaching their bail conditions and could be rearrested. According to the couple, the police told the sureties that direct quotes in news reports posted online could be interpreted as attempts to communicate via the Internet, or as an attempt to organize public demonstrations, both violations of their conditions. “The conditions don’t prohibit people from speaking to the media,” OPP Inspector Dave Ross says. “It was what was being said that was viewed as being a violation of the bail conditions.” Counters John Norris, Hundert’s lawyer: “It is unusual to have bail terms interpreted this way. It goes well beyond the bail orders and anything that the police ought to be doing in a constitutional democracy.”

Other oddities have cropped up as part of the G20 prosecutions. There is the matter of the temporary Public Works Protection Act regulation that authorities said gave police a mandate to search and demand ID from anyone coming within five metres of the G20 security fence. It emerged later that the law never afforded authorities that option, and that police and the Ontario government neglected to correct the misapprehension until after the summit. When 31-year-old Dave Vasey, the only person charged under the rule, arrived at court last week with his summons to appear, he found his charge had vanished from the computer system. “We were all excited to go to trial,” says Vasey, a York University graduate student. “That it was lost was pretty convenient for the powers that be.”

Then there is the 53-year-old man, Gary McCullough, whom police arrested a day before the G20 summit began after discovering he was hauling a crossbow, a chainsaw and jerry cans in a homemade box strapped to the roof of his car. Though police later said his arrest had nothing to do with the G20 and even suggested he would not be charged, McCullough remains in jail in Milton over a month later and now faces one count of weapons dangerous. His defence lawyer, James Carlisle, says McCullough, who lives in a rural area north of Toronto, is a diagnosed schizo­phrenic who would in any other circumstance have been quickly released on bail. Yet Carlisle says the case has been “coloured” by the G20, not least because the matter continues to be handled by the special team of Crown attorneys tasked with the G20 prosecutions.

(The complexities here can be almost laughable. Rachelle Sauvé, a G20 protester from Peterborough charged with obstructing police and wearing a disguise to commit an indictable offence, must have had some satisfaction when a Peterborough, Ont., newspaper printed a clarification headlined “Not in costume” explaining that an article stating she’d been “wearing a clown outfit when she was arrested” was incorrect. “Sauvé says she wore several costumes throughout the week to stand out,” it says, “but was not in a costume at the time of her arrest.” Maclean’s also reported Sauvé was dressed as a clown.)

Meanwhile, Henderson is looking forward to Sept. 4, when she will travel to Edmonton to attend her younger sister’s wedding as maid of honour—a trip that required some negotiation with the Crown. Still, she is not permitted, as per the conditions of her bail, to spend time alone with her own fiancé. One or other of their sureties must chaperone the couple.

 
discovering he was hauling a crossbow, a chainsaw and jerry cans in a homemade box strapped to the roof of his car. Though police later said his arrest had nothing to do with the G20 and even suggested he would not be charged, McCullough remains in jail in Milton over a month later and now faces one count of weapons dangerous. His defence lawyer, James Carlisle, says McCullough, who lives in a rural area north of Toronto, is a diagnosed schizo­phrenic who would in any other circumstance have been quickly released on bail.


Good idea.
 
Many of the points made in this article have already been mentioned in our discusion so far.


Here reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act:


G20 team uses high tech to find tiny clues
17/09/2010 6:31:32 PM
ctvtoronto.ca

LINK

A team of Toronto police investigators is spending 12-hour days behind computer and video monitors, looking for tiny clues in images to identify those responsible for a massive vandalism spree at the G20 summit this past June.

They are sorting through more than 40,000 still images and countless hours of videos, taken during the June 26-27 meeting of world leaders in Toronto.

Their foes used so-called Black Bloc tactics.

The vandals joined a massive, peaceful labour-sponsored march on June 26. They emerged out of the crowd on Queen Street, dressed in black, and went on a 90-minute rampage in the downtown core outside the inner and outer G20 security zones.

Business windows were smashed and six police cruisers either torched or otherwise damaged.

As the vandalism wound down, the vandals -- who numbered in the hundreds -- went to great lengths to hide their identities as they stripped off their black clothing and blended back into the crowds.

Police had aircraft and satellite images to supplement the CCTV cameras mounted on streetlight posts, images captured by undercover officers and those sent in by the public.

But the vandals knew they were being watched from above.

They would form a circle and hold up an umbrella. After their fellow vandals stripped off their black clothing, they would look like almost anyone else on the street.

"If you watch the tactics, they'll all face out," Det. Mike Jander told CTV Toronto. "They'll all face out with the umbrellas out to block it."

CTV Toronto cameras captured some of the vandals "de-bloc-ing" on that chaotic day, even though their fellow vandals tried to shield them.

But while people can shed their clothes, they can't easily shed other physical aspects of their identity, such as:

piercings
tattoos
sunglasses
shoes
Jander and Det. Bill McGarry are part of the squad that operates out of a secret location.

"As you get closer to their body, they have has something that makes them uniquely different from the next Black Bloc person," McGarry said.

With one person of interest, it's what's on their head.

"This is a male that looks like him. He's got the same hat," McGarry said. "I'd have to see what else he was wearing and compare his clothing.

Looking even closer at the images of another suspect, they can find even more unique identifying marks.

"He has what appears to be a mole or a mark on his arm," McGarry said. "It's kind of hard to seen on the screen but he actually appears to have the same thing."

A search of the Internet revealed the man to be playing drums in a band.

They think he lives in New York state, and are working with police there to identify and possibly arrest the man. Det. Sgt. Gary Giroux, who heads the G20 team, has said at least two of his "worst of the worst" suspects are from the New York City area.

Every person of interest has a file folder into which their photos are dropped.

Police have periodically released photos of G20 suspects, seeking the public's help in identifying suspects. They last sent out an update on Wednesday.

The last new suspect arrest was announced on Sept. 10. More than 20 arrests have been made by the team to date.

Giroux has said he believes the team has rounded up most of the GTA and southern Ontario-based suspects.

While more than 1,100 people were arrested on that weekend, about three-quarters were never criminally charged. Almost 60 others had their charges dropped last month.

More than 230 cases remain before the courts, including those of 17 people the police consider ringleaders.

But the number doesn't include those as yet-unidentified suspects the G20 detectives are still seeking.

With a report from CTV Toronto's Austin Delaney


 
Can't hide from the prying eyes of a camera. Especially in downtown TO, there's cameras in every store/bank/office building.
 
Like we need ANOTHER probe?  Highlights below mine...
A group of lawyers, civil libertarians and politicians are renewing their calls for a full public inquiry into the G20 summit.

The call comes 100 days after the controversial gathering of world leaders was held in Toronto.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath says she'll introduce a bill in the Ontario legislature that would create an inquiry to examine all aspects of government and law enforcement decision-making related to the June summit.

Howard Morton, a lawyer who defended the only person charged under the province's so-called fence law, and Graeme Norton, a lawyer with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, are urging the public to support the bill.

They say a full public inquiry is needed to get to the bottom of what happened.

Even though six separate reviews of the G20 are already underway, they say none have the mandate or jurisdiction to provide the answers many people are seeking ....
More from the Canadian Press here.
 
I'll tell em what happened:

A bunch of professional agitators smashed windows and burned police cars. Not because they beleive in anything; they caused havoc and destruction because they could.

The next G20 should be in Russia in the shadow of the Kremlin.
 
Where, oh where, are the people who complained about the $1.1 billion budget, now that this event has more probes than a backwoods Alabama UFO tale?

This horse needs to be taken out behind the barn, and quickly.

 
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