TO SUMMIT IT UP: THE COPS MAY NOT HAVE GOTTEN IT

Just a warning: This post has definite political overtones, something I try to avoid but as I've said before, it's sometimes difficult to divorce politics from your daily life

What this post does contain is a level of irony so deep and unintended it made me want to push Reset on my brain, because I thought I had made a mistake while importing the data

In 2010 Toronto paid host to the G20 Summit. It was several days of riots, burning police cars, civil disobedience both illicit and legitimate and marked, overall, by the impression that our policing authorities had kind of lost their grip on the situation

Part of downtown was fenced, special jails were set up on the street and while the initial rioters were merely observed by the police and allowed to run away (supposedly to be caught another day) other people, like U of T professors were immediately arrested.

I wrote a couple of posts about it at the time; you can find them here and here and here and finally here

In the time since then there have been several investigations. Cops were charged with things ranging from mismanagement in deploying of officers, invalid arrests, and one cop was charged with assault after baton whipping a person already in custody. Many cops, before the riots even took place, "blacked out" their badges by putting tape over their badge numbers. Not only is this an infraction it spoke to a rather chilling frame of mind of these officers; it was as if they anticipated violating rules and laws and were quite prepared to do so.

Many higher authorities from the provincial ombudsman to the regional police watchdogs who cited 100's of violations. It seems very clear that this was a very dark time for the Toronto police dept. Even Chief Blair admitted to being "overwhelmed."

So it came as a jaw dropping surprise to me that the special police task force that had been created for the summit is so proud of their performance that have awarded themselves with positive citations and commendations. Their reasoning: Hundreds or arrests were made, the task force was thrown together almost on a whim and boy did they bust a lot of people ...

Seems to be irrelevant that most of these "busts" have been deemed, at least, capricious and many instances, downright illegal. A bust is a bust I guess. After all, ain't a cop's job to convict, it's to make arrests. To paraphrase a popular saying: Arrest em all and let smarter people sort em out later.

It's also rather telling that such an important task force was "thrown together" Not only was the police dept overwhelmed, they seemed to be taken by surprise. Funny, I knew about the summit months before hand and have watched for years the violent riots that can take place at these things.

It's also very telling that a few weeks ago police chief Blair sent an inhouse video critisizing his own rank and file for their cavalier attitude, their flaunting of official police policies and a general disregard for their own public perceptions. That entreaty seemed to have fallen on deaf ears as did all those G20 investigations and charges.

A bust is a bust.

Perhaps it's time to put a fence around police headquarters