G20

This is basically in response to the questions of police brutality or violations of civil liberties or even fundamental human rights in the riots at the G20 summit last summer. To begin we need to establish any circumstances that could potentially effect our determinations. To what extent do our civil liberties cover, specifically if laws are violated on mass? One could easily say that out civil liberties are absolute and are not able to be violated by nature. Simply put that is wrong, our civil liberties have been disbanded before like in the 1970 October crisis. But whether or not this was necessarily correct is another issue within itself. But given the precedent we can determine that our civil liberties are not absolute or concrete.

The violent incidents within the G20 protests began with simple crimes like vandalism, and would eventually escalate; does this validate the response by the G20 police? The principle used to approach this situation can be simply described as "better safe than sorry". Given the fact that police cruisers were set on fire and there was in fact violence amongst some small anarchist groups, was it acceptable to overtake the civil liberties amongst the peaceful protesters? Let's view this from a psychoanalytical standpoint, what do we know in terms of mob mentality? We know it is infectious and we know that when it spreads it becomes pathogenic and uncontrollable. Could the police afford the proliferation of the anarchists’ mindset? On one level it is clear that they could not afford such spreading but does that give them authority to the point of violent installment of control over the people?

The number one counterargument for this viewpoint is the actions taken that could be deemed excessive or just plain brutal; take for instance the amputee and the French student. The amputee's incident seems to be a story of animalistic police brutality, I am not saying I support the actions taken here by the G20 police but I am saying that I understand them. They were acting simply as humans they were motivated by self-interest and self-preservation, what I'm saying is they acted this way to try and remove and capacity for violence amongst the protestors because they did not want to jeopardize their own well-being. Given violent actions that already targeted police can anybody honestly tell me they would act in such a way that the protestors were able to act in any way they wish including digression to violence? The issue of natural law and "what would the logical man do?" Is one frequently used in court defense, let's translate; if you were a G20 police officer would you respect the peoples' freedom to demonstrate even given some of the violent outbreaks throughout the city? If you were a G20 police officer and you knew that violent anarchist demonstrators were wearing black clothes, would you feel comfortable around demonstrators in black? If you say 'no', you're lying, you cannot contradict human nature. In terms of the arrests made at the University of Toronto, I do not condone the fact that arrests were made hand over fist but the action was understandable from the viewpoint of the police because it was their instruction to maintain control. The fact that they were armed is not able to be contested, they were a tactical response squad, a subdivision off of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) When this unit enters a building they are armed regardless of circumstance, end of question. Their instructions were to find people who matched pictures, the fact the French girl was arrested was an unfortunate coincidence. We also need to question some of the word of mouth stories on shows like The Fifth Estate. People can lie or stretch the truth so it is more lenient to them, furthermore the snips of the interview with the chief of police were skewed if not entirely quoted out of context, simply put you cannot trust television absolutely, you need to look into the issue yourself.