Calling for an Inquiry on Cdn Police Handling of Protestors

A lot of Canadians are getting their eyes opened to how police handle protests of different forms/by different groups during this siege. Esp when comparing their actions to how they come across when handling other groups.

• There is a real disconnect between officers giving the protestors hugs as they send them home or off to jail, when they’ve threatened a sitting PM’s life, disrupted trade, blocked int’l bridges, and roads, cut off an entire town from 911 services and food, and harassed the local citizenry. The officers were not ever dressed in riot gear.

And a few homeless people gathering to try to survive who have addictions and mental health, possibly physical health issues. They were greeted with horses, riot gear and serious weapons vs handguns. They were dragged and beaten.

And First Nation land defenders who are trying to protect their land, and their culture. Who get They were greeted with tanks, SUVs, beatings, riot gear.

And at the G20 summit in 2010 in Toronto, environmentalists who walked down the street for a couple hours, and were sitting down, prepared to give themselves up for arrest at the end. were rushed and beaten, dragged by police in riot gear.

Perhaps because it was political and sanctioned by the Prime Minister’s presence , the BLM movement was treated with decency in Canada. But these same people are murdered and beaten when under arrest, or even under a mental health warrant.

…….

It’s hard to see, harder still to realize it’s true. And hard to imagine what can be done. How do the same people for a different cause get mishandled? How do different people who are actually there for good motives get treated differently? In a crowd of protestors and counter-protestors, one First Nations’ man was arrested for standing and holding a sign that said both sides should go home, it was his people’s land. Not theirs. And nobody lifted a voice or a finger to help or question what the police were doing.

When faced with people in a group that wanted to overthrow the govt and had threatened a sitting PM’s life, the police were siding with them and arresting counter protestors. Not that group.

Faced with a group that had threatened and done violence and were receiving and soliciting funding from outside the country to rabble rouse and overthrow a sitting, just elected govt, the police who are supposed to uphold the law of the land, were siding with the protestors.

……

Not all of the officers did these things. But those who did? They did it knowing they were on camera. Their fellow officers did nothing to stop or censure them. Their command don’t seem that interested in what was going on. The impression that made of who the police are to Canadians.

So how do you separate the wheat from the chaff here? Where do you start to look for solutions to a horrible problem? It’s racism, elitism, oppression, and just wrong acts. In the name of policing. In the name of law and order. In the name of public safety.

What is the alternative? Because this isn’t working. It’s not fair, impartial or a good model of how we’re supposed to act.

……

It was really easy in 2020 to watch from the side-lines as the BLM protests were mishandled in the USA and say ‘that’s not us. That’s not Canadian’. But now we know, if we didn’t before, that it is us. So what do we do now?