Shocked, shocked!

There is much talk on the internet about the police in Toronto deliberately letting vandals go to work, then going out and stomping on legitimate protesters the next day. It is called, I've learned, the Miami Model of policing.

Actually, from my experience, it should be called the Paris Model. In the 1980s, there were several big student protests in Paris, and the policing technique was always the same. They let the handful of vandals go nuts one evening, then the next evening the riot police went batshit insane. In one instance, in December, 1986, shopkeepers literally yanked young people (including me) off the streets and into their stores and cafés to protect them from marauding bands of motorcycle police. Given the green light, the cops did not discriminate between protesters and passers-by. That evening a young French Arab, Malik Oussekine, was beaten to death by the police in an apartment lobby of the Latin Quarter.

Now, nothing that dramatic happened in Toronto. But what we, far away, first got was a picture of a torched police cruiser beamed around the world. Then, the next day, as the world had got the story line straight, came a series of unpublicized (the world already had the story line, see?), truly inexplicable, meaningless police attacks on peaceful protestors. Check out the youtubes, they’re ridiculous: see what happened at Queen’s Park, Queen & Spadina… It's just mindless aggression against people holding cameras, singing "Oh Canada", hanging out.

And the mayor of Toronto wringing his hands, shocked, shocked that there is gambling going in this establishment. Right.

I’ve got absolutely no sympathy for the vandals – I’ve seen what jerks they are. And I won't call them "anarchists" as that demeans the respectable political position of Anarchism (it's called Libertarianism in the US). I also don't want to be knee-jerk anti-daddy, but it looks to me like the police played the thugs like a violin, all in the cause of intimidating everybody else.

I’m sorry I can’t hyperlink yet, but below is an eyewitness account. Copy and paste. When I saw that burnt cop car (20,000 policemen cannot protect compact, downtown Toronto?!), it smelled very bad:

http://crooksandliars.com/ian-welsh/police-allow-vandals-run-amok-2-hours-g2