G20 Policing Puts a Visible Face on a Silent War

By Dawn Paley

As G8 heads of state meet in Huntsville, Ontario, people in Toronto are preparing to spend the weekend in what is being described more and more frequently as a police state. Some might feel that its over the top to talk about Toronto being a police state*, but not those who've already been subject to arbitrary detentions, or who have lived through situations of armed conflict.

For refugees living in Canada, the sight of hundreds of police surrounding a gathering in a park can trigger painful memories of the wars that they lived through.

"As a survivor of the war in Guatemala, I feel bad," said Edgar Godoy, who now lives in Toronto and organizes with the Latin American Trade Union Coalition. The 36-year-long internal conflict in Guatemala is today recognized as having been a genocide against Indigenous Guatemalans, with over 250,000 dead and 50,000 still disappeared. Most of the victims were killed by the Guatemalan police and military. "I lost half my family and I have wounds that have not healed. Seeing all the police here, it terrorizes me," he said.

The thousands of police officers in Toronto for the G20 appear to have orders to stop, detain and interrogate people for wearing anti-G20 t-shirts, for videotaping, or for carrying a picket sign.

"We can't mobilize, we can't speak. That's what we lived in Guatemala in the 70s and 80s," said Godoy. "We have a name for that in Latin America, we call it the criminalization of resistance and the right to speak out."

When two men were detained and one of them was arrested yesterday for walking downtown, neither was aware that the Ontario Public Works Protection Act now applies to the G20 fence.

"We both refused to give our names, we said we do not consent to a search," said Fenton. "They said that under the Public Works Act they had the right to arrest us, search us and learn our names even without due cause, without charges."

Franklin López, an independent video producer who was on assignment with Democracy Now!, was pulled off a streetcar yesterday by four young police officers who were concerned that he was filming them.

"The charter gives us freedom of the press, and if we're going to have a truly free press, police intimidation can't be part of the process," said López. "Four police officers interrogating a journalist because he's filming the security situation in Toronto does not foment freedom of the press."

Even journalists from the status quo media have complained about police overkill. After being surrounded by what sounds like dozens of police officers including bomb sniffing dogs on his way to Huntsville, veteran Canadian Press reporter Terry Pedwell started to get a little annoyed.

"I was still being detained, nearly two hours after being pulled over. And I was growing only slightly aggravated by the lengths to which they were going to interrogate a reporter," he wrote. He thinks that the police might have had a concern about press freedom when he was denied the right to videotape the interrogation, after which he was finally let go.

But anyone who thinks that these policies are but exceptional interruptions in an otherwise democratic society ought to think again.

"I feel actually quite badly for [street-involved] people who have those sorts of encounters with police on a regular basis and I'm actually quite concerned about what's coming next... Civil liberties seem to be going out the window these days," said Micheal Walsh, after being stopped in Toronto yesterday for carrying picket signs.

On the ground organizers are explicitly connecting mobilizations in Toronto to daily struggles against criminalization, repression and police brutality.

"On June 25th, we will march alongside community groups who organize daily against the indignities and dehumanization of poverty, discrimination, lack of inclusive services, wage-slave working conditions, repressive immigration policies, gentrification, environmental degradation, and police brutality," reads a statement by No One Is Illegal.