Globe and Mail journalist arrested and kettled at G20 Toronto

Lisan sez, "On Sunday, police corralled 100+ protesters and pedestrians at a G20 bike rally in Toronto. I was caught in the group while tweeting on behalf of national newspaper The Globe and Mail. We were made to stand in the torrential rain for 4 hours, then arrested -- dog walkers, the homeless, the elderly, peaceful protestors and accredited media -- every last one of us."

Caught in the storm, penned in at Queen Street (Thanks, Lisan!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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mdh

Oh Canada!
- arkizzle / Moderator
  
  +1 :)
abstract_reg

TIME OUT.

Canada is not a police state! Canada is a country that has police officers that love Toronto and got emotional when people started attacking their city. If you saw 300 people crowding around and 50 of them were smashing windows in your city, how would you react? If you saw them smashing cars; if you saw people attacking the people trying to videotape them to get rid of the “evidence”; if you saw a mere handful of people in the crowd lighting cars on fire; How would you react? If you would actually be able to remain a rational human at that time then you deserve a medal.

That being said, police should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us. Only, is that standard actually achievable? We expect the police to obey and uphold the law but what about when it is a choice between the law and the public safety, as the police would argue it was at the G20. Certainly the police should acknowledge and apologize for every miscarriage of justice, but I feel that there are individual officers who deserve to be applauded for not allowing the destruction that occurred to not grow any further.
Micheal Kelly

I don’t agree with what happened, but in the interests of clarity (for those who don’t read the actual article):

The Globe and Mail story opens with the following:

“Lisan works at The Globe and Mail and although she wasnâ€™t accredited for the summits or on assignment, globeandmail.com was using some of her tweets in our live coverage.”

Whereas Cory’s post above makes it sound as though she was accredited. Which she wasn’t.
- MatthewFabb
  
  While she was working as just a freelancer for the Globe & Mail, she did mention in the article that she had media credentials on her, which as others have pointed out meant nothing to the police.
  
  Here’s a blog entry that sums up reporter’s Steve Paikin tweets about Jesse Rosenfeld, a freelancer for the UK’s Guardian, who was arrested and beat up by police in Toronto:
  http://openfile.ca/blog/steve-paikin-tweets-g20-frontlines
- Anonymous
  
  Micheal, I am an employee of the Globe and Mail. I am the social media columnist as well as an editor there. I was not accredited _for the summit_ but I do own a press pass for the newspaper.
  
  In any case, whether I was accredited or not makes no difference to the fact that my civil liberties were violated.
  
  Lisan
Orchestra Spy

An Anon cop lover? That’s a riot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-h-YIj4jRw
- Anonymous
  
  I was there, no need for the (timely edited)video. Not a cop lover, not a lover of the protesters that caused the havoc. Just stating what I saw. You understand that people are allowed to have opinions that aren’t your own, correct?
  
  Gerry
Trent Hawkins

A Ctv Producer also got arrested: http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100627/g20-arrested-accounts-100627?hub=TorontoNewHome
- joeposts
  
  It was funny watching it on the news. The CTV reporter was panicking as she realized press credentials meant nothing to the goon squad that had surrounded anyone who happened to be at one of the busiest intersections in one of the most popular shopping districts in Toronto on a weekend.
  
  Really though, everyone was lucky they were only illegally detained, arrested on false charges, and not beaten to a pulp. The police were showing REAL restraint! ;-)
Typhoon_

loraksus wrote: ” “It’s a beautiful day outside. I think I’ll go for an enjoyable, unoppressed, walk.”

I hope you enjoy it, knowing that your “enjoyable, unopressed walk” is only possible because you’ve been allowed or even permitted to do so.”

No. Only because I choose to do so. Also the streets are now free of young overly-earnest, self-righteous precious little snowflakes playing revolutionary.

Having direct experience of what life in a real police state is like makes it simple and easy to distinguish between turgid fantasy and simple reality.
- zikzak
  
  Because of the violent protesters and their numerous supporters. Any other time I walk around not experiencing any oppression whatsoever.
  
  Pro-tip: If, during a massive groundswell of popular resistance against global elitism and first-world privilege, your primary concern is how it will affect your personal ability to take a pleasant stroll, you are probably the enemy.
osmo

Oh I remember the riots in Gothenburg in 2001. Thats the first time I ever told anyone I was a militant anything.
Ive always been kinda leftist I guess in that “go workers rights, go unions!” way. I’ve worked more or less full time since I was 17 so it came natural. At the time of the protests and riots I first got really angry at all these protesters marching around my town, messing it up, until they catched me and some friends walking home from an after-work-beer. My friend Kristoffer went to the hospital the longest, a week in all. His face was like chopped meat when we finally got him into an ambulance – you could see his teeth on the right side breaking through the skin. They stomped me and the rest pretty good too, but he got the worst of it. They kept calling us “rÃ¶dingar” (the words the neo-nazis used back then as a derogatory for socialists), faggots and other little things they thought was insulting.

“This is Sweden” I kept thinking. We dont do this here. This is the “nice country”. My friend Erik broke a few ribs and I got some nasty cuts in my scalp from … something – a billy club I guess. They never arrested any of us – we all walked away. They just wanted to fuck someone up I guess.

The next day me, some of the other guys from work and some friends of friends went out with scarves over our faces. That was the day they shot some stupid kid in the gut and shot straight into the crowd we where in missing everyone except a german guy who got it in the leg.
The day after that a few of my co-workers started trashing police cars at random whenever they had the chance.

Im not saying that it was right (or wrong for that matter) or that all cops are evil or that we fared worse than Lisan. Just that, that day, we kinda woke up and realised that the police wherent our friends in navy-blue and that things wherent as clear-cut as we had thought with police and bad people being the people the police beat up.

Basicly what Im saying is that its through this monopoly of violence that they control things. When all else failes they still outgun us. They know that and they use that.
Anonymous

Reporters and journalists from all over were beaten. Not just this one case:

Police beat journalist covering G20: report
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/06/28/g20-rosenfeld-police.html

Also see:
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/rabble-staff/2010/06/guardian-journalist-jesse-rosenfeld-beaten-and-arrested-toronto-p

There are more…
Anonymous

Someone above wrote:

“Having direct experience of what life in a real police state is like makes it simple and easy to distinguish between turgid fantasy and simple reality.”

I experienced “saturation policing” as a legal observer among peaceful demonstrators who were encircled and chronically bullied by 11,000 uniformed officers at the Democratic Convention in 2000. Among other things, I stood in irrationally “kettled” crowds for hours, and I helped document rubber bullet injuries to the faces and bodies of lawyers and law students who had been in a crowd as peaceful monitors of police conduct. That experience gave me a lively and quite real understanding of what a police state is. It makes me deeply concerned when some bloviator pretends that the absence of full-time totalitarianism justifies its temporary imposition.
SDukeEllis

“The average citizen living under a totalitarian regime has no idea.”

This is changing. Bad news is, it’s because everybody is living under a totalitarian regime. Somebody in here needs to understand that police states devolve out of democracies all the time. The UK (from whom we got the Magna Carta) is a police state. The USA (from whom we got the Declaration of Independence, a work of genius) is a police state. You think Canada is exempt from the principle of entropy?
Anonymous

A Craigslist add that was taken down (some captured it at DSLreports:
http://www.dslreports.com/speak/slideshow/24449966?c=1558964&ret=L2ZvcnVtL3IyNDQ0NDY0Ny1Qcm90ZXN0LU5ld3N%2Bc3RhcnQ9MjQw

Notice the guy having his face stomped on?

Notice the terrified little girl?
BalorBoru

Regardless of whether or not she was accredited, stories like this are popping up all over and highlight the same sort of mindless coralling done by a lot of police here in Toronto. I still find it baffling how these sort of useless arrests happened so often while 3 police cruisers are abandoned and left to burn in the street, and kiddy-revolutionaries smash store windows. What the EFF, T.O. Police? I hate being in the middle and getting fucked from both sides. That’s what happened to most of the peaceful protestors, too. Thugs on one side, hired thugs on the other, quashing and drowning out the more legitimate purposes of protest.
Typhoon_

I read some of the Lisan twits on the G&M during the weekend. From them I simply assumed that she was a activist – protester. No surprise that she is unaccredited.

One of the popular, if hackneyed chants, was “Take Back the Streets”. Well, the only time in memory I have not been able to walk freely around my neighbourhood [in the centre of the action] without any concern for my well being whatsoever was this weekend.

Why?

http://acidcow.com/pics/10982-g20-protesters-in-toronto-14-pics.html

Because of the violent protesters and their numerous supporters. Any other time I walk around not experiencing any oppression whatsoever.

So I’m glad that the weekend protests are over and we have finally been able to “Take Back the Streets” from the wannabe revolutionaries and other precious snowflakes. It’s a beautiful day outside. I think I’ll go for an enjoyable, unoppressed, walk.
- loraksus
  
  “It’s a beautiful day outside. I think I’ll go for an enjoyable, unoppressed, walk.”
  
  I hope you enjoy it, knowing that your “enjoyable, unopressed walk” is only possible because you’ve been allowed or even permitted to do so.
Anonymous

Just so everybody knows, in each case I saw hands on where the police rushed the crowds, they always announced that they were going to. Like with a loud speaker saying “in two minutes we are moving forward, move back”. And people sat there. And they got rushed.

The whole scenario was very weird. I felt bad for everybody. The cops were put in some weird circumstances because of the anarchist Black Bloc protesters, so they didn’t know which way was up. The peaceful protesters had their protests ruined because Black Bloc protesters kept mingling/hiding in their crowds.

Side note, I also heard way more French being spoken than english amongst the asshole protesters.

I think we need protesters against certain protesters in the future.

Anyways… meh. It was three days. It’s over. Get on with it. G20… have fun in Seoul.
loraksus

Is anyone surprised? Really?

The new face of policing during events like this is defined by the arbitrary and capricious use of force, intimidation and making a mockery of the legal system with mass arrests which are justified by charges that won’t stick (and are dropped en masse after an arbitrary time period)

By rounding up random people including journalists, they’ve sent a clear message to everyone that nobody is safe from them and that our participation in the political process (or lack thereof) is contingent on their approval.

This isn’t new. Regardless of how warm and fuzzy they want to make themselves, this is your police. They sidestep the judiciary whenever it suits their needs and pretty much do whatever they want.

I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one who finds this sort of behavior distasteful.
- dfornika
  
  “I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one who finds this sort of behavior distasteful.”
  
  No, you’re not. I’m with you 100% and I appreciate you voicing it so clearly.
  
  The people that offered resistance should be celebrated. It takes courage to stand up to armed police, and these people risked their health and safety to exercise their freedom.
ADavies

MDH – Oh no. Don’t you even TRY singing the Canadian national anthem. That will get you a double bonus beat down…

http://torontoist.com/2010/06/live_g20_sunday.php#425AM-28