Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Saddest story yet

To protest the way the police treated the G20 demonstrators, a Toronto man gives back the Bravery Citation he had received from Toronto police:
...Norman avoided downtown that weekend but he, like everyone else, knew what was going on. “The air was full of people talking about what had happened to their friends.” A thousand arrests, people being stopped for no good reason, ID demanded, and so on. . . "they were arresting people two miles away. And then we heard the premier saying that no new powers were given to the police. If that’s the case, what protection do I have now? And what the hell can I do about that?”
The question was not rhetorical.
“I can give this back.”
Others in Toronto were also upset at what they saw. Paul Pritchard, the person who recorded the Dziekanski tasering has a summer job as a waiter in Toronto:
Armed with his camera, he arrived by bike at Queen’s Park in time to see a man bowled over by a police horse. In his view, a young, peaceful crowd of protesters was under assault.
“I got up right on the front line. The guy beside me got shot with a rubber bullet. I was half expecting to get stomped, or beaten. I thought my camera was going to get broken for sure.”
He slipped the memory card from his camera, hiding it in the side band of his boxers. People were crying. Some jeered, others taunted. He only ever saw one item thrown, possibly a stick, the culprit immediately called down by other demonstrators.
On the other side, he saw, “Anger. Hostility. Using force. Using intimidation. You could see it in their eyes.”

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